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A Year in Art: Australia 1992 @ Tate Modern

This is a very, very political exhibition, bigger than I expected (5 rooms), artistically important, wide-ranging, illuminating and sometimes very upsetting.

It’s a broad selection of art from contemporary Australia all based round the theme of the calamitous impact of white European colonisation on the continent’s indigenous people. (As I understand it, we should nowadays not use ‘Aborigine’ or ‘aboriginal’; it’s best practice to say ‘indigenous Australians’ or ‘indigenous people’.)

This exhibition brings together art works by indigenous people, alongside works by Australian artists of European descent, all revolving round the themes of colonialism, expropriation, racism, and cultural erasure i.e. the systematic denial of the existence of indigenous people, their deprivation of legal and voting rights, crude attempts to turn them into good Christian citizens, and the banning of their culture, language and traditions.

The exhibition displays a wide variety of media including paintings, photos, artistically treated documents, maps, a huge video installation, some very large fabrics accompanied by sculptures. There’s a lot of explanatory text which makes you feel thoroughly ashamed to be white, British and, of course, a man, since some of the women artists in the show consider the appalling violence and injustices meted out to the Indigenous people the result not only of colonialism but of specifically ‘male modes of power’.

Untitled (Alhalkere) by Emily Kame Kngwarreye

Australia 1992 is part of a series Tate has recently devised which aims to look at the artworks which cluster round a key year in a country’s history, the series having the general name ‘A Year In Art’. The first one was ‘A Year in Art: 1973’ which explored how artists responded to the 1973 coup d’etat in Chile which brought General Pinochet to power.

This is the second in the series and the title, ‘Australia 1992’, begs the question: what is so important about the year 1992? Well, it was the year of a landmark decision by the Australian High Court which overturned the concept of terra nullius (meaning ‘land belonging to nobody’). This was the doctrine by which the British had justified colonising the land now known as Australia.

The concept was used to, in effect, deny the existence of the native Aboriginal peoples who had inhabited Australia for 30,000 years, had developed a lifestyle in balance with its particular natural characteristics, as well as complex societies built on clan structures, a culture rich in hundreds of distinct languages. The High Court decision was the climax of decades of work by indigenous rights campaigners and provided a new legal basis for ongoing campaigns to expand indigenous rights and extend legal protections to indigenous culture.

Buluwana, Female Ancestor by John Mawurndjul (1989)

The art works in the show aren’t all from the year 1992, far from it, much of it is from the subsequent thirty years and some of it is bang up to date. But it all rotates and revolves around the issues thrown up by that 1992 ruling.

Room one

The first room contains three important elements. Firstly, a set of four videos by key artists featured in the show, namely Helen Johnson, Judy Watson, and Dale Horton. These are all 4 or so minutes long. The fourth video features an extended interview with Aborigine artist John Mawurndjul who explains how, although he lives in the new world, the new dispensation of the white man, he maintains the stories and traditions handed down from his father and his father’s father, hence the title of the film, ‘I am the old and the new’. John takes the camera team to a dry and dusty location out in the country where he explains the design and meaning of ancient Aboriginal rock art. He’s also filmed using traditional tools and paints, in particular a kind of soft bark brush, to create the fine striping visible in a work like Buluwana, Female Ancestor.

Another important display in this room is of drawings made by Edward Koiki Mabo of the land on Torres Island which he claimed was his under ancestral indigenous law, drawings used in the 1992 court case. There are three of these, indicating the location of plants, landmarks, traditional use and ownership, which had been passed down to Mabo through 17 generations of tradition. They’re the subject of a wall label explaining more of the detail of the case, its results and implications.

Lastly, there’s a factual (i.e. non-art) map of Australia, an attempt by scholars to represent the language or nation groups of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

The AIATSIS map of Indigenous Australia attempts to represent the language, social or nation groups of indigenous Australia, by David R. Horton (1996)

Note that the word ‘Country’ is used in a special sense to denote the Aborigines’ ancient connection with the land of their ancestry. So throughout the exhibition the curators refer to Country not ‘the country’ or ‘the landscape’.

Artists and works

There are five rooms in the show and, given that the central one is enormous, space for lots of art works.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye expresses her cultural life as an Anmatyerre elder and her intricate relationship to country in Untitled (Alhalkere) (top of this review).

John Mawurndjul is featured with his bark painting Buluwana, Female Ancestor, created with a fine cross-hatching technique used by generations of Kuninjku artists.

Dale Harding was the subject of one of the videos in the first room. There he explained that he often paints directly onto a gallery wall to create a site-specific work and images of these make them look dramatic. Sadly, that hasn’t happened here and he’s represented by a moveable work, The Leap/ Watershed, in which he’s blown ochre onto a large canvas to create an abstract shape. Although this isn’t particularly obvious, apparently it is intended to reference both the life-giving attributes of the land and the 1867 massacre of Aboriginal people in Mackay, Queensland. ‘The Leap’ refers to a rock formation in Yuwi Country where around 200 indigenous people chose to leap to their deaths rather than surrender to the Queensland Native Police Force.

The Leap by Dale Harding

There’s a great series of works by Judy Watson entitled ‘A Preponderance of Aboriginal Blood’. These 15 framed works take official documents used by the Australian authorities in the 19th and 20th centuries to categorise indigenous peoples and allot them (or not) voting and other rights. Thus, until 1965 you had to be able to prove you had a ‘White’ parent in order to vote, in Queensland. The categorisations include racial ones by which a person was defined as being ‘fullblood’, ‘half-blood’, ‘quadroon’ and so on, terms I’m familiar with from the same system applied in the American South in the slavery era.

What turns them into art is that Watson has spattered them with red pain mimicking blood. These documents obsessed with ‘blood’ have been drenched in the object of their enquiry, blood which also indicates the numbers of indigenous people murdered by the white military and police over the centuries. A stain on Australia’s history and conscience.

From ‘A Preponderance of Aboriginal Blood’ by Judy Watson (2005)

The complete set, along with a detailed explanation, is available on the Tate website.

In a similar spirit of taking colonial documents or concepts and undermining them, is the work of Helen Johnson. She’s represented by a couple of enormous rectangular fabrics, suspended from the ceiling, on which she creates images complex satirical images. The series is titled ‘Seat of Power’ and is from 2016.

Seat of Power by Judy Watson (2016)

This work needs a bit of explanation (which is available on the Tate web page devoted to it). It consists of a large unstretched acrylic painting on canvas which depicts a satirical image of the British parliament in session by the Victorian illustrator Richard Doyle, itself overlaid with partially legible text which refers to a chair that was gifted to the House of Representatives in Canberra, Australia by the UK branch of the Empire Parliamentary Association in 1926.

It’s big and it’s striking but, as you can see, it needs a fair bit of explaining unlike, say, all of the indigenous art on display which speaks immediately to the eye and heart. It also demonstrates a small principle about art and literature, which is that satire doesn’t have to be funny. It can be, but it doesn’t have to be and Watson’s works aren’t.

This point is easily made by comparison with a set of works by Gordon Bennett titled ‘How to Cross the Void’. These are a series of gawky cartoons or sketches of scenes, with satirical text written in, but unlike the Watson they are actively funny. The best example is this one depicting a dark-skinned man hanging himself in a cell, with the advice that, if you get into difficulty hanging yourself, you can always ask a policeman. They’ll be happy to help 🙂

‘Ask a policeman’ from ‘How to Cross the Void’ by Gordon Bennett (1993)

But alongside the amusing cartoon element there’s also something quite conceptual or cerebral going on in this series. All the images incorporate a black square. This is a reference to the clack square painted by the Russian Suprematist painter, Kazimir Malevich, made in 1915. In retrospect, art historians take this to be a founding work and moment in modern art for completely rejecting all vestiges of realism or figuratism. Malevich intended it to be the end of that tradition of painting and the start of a new tradition of pure abstraction and sometimes referred to it not as a square but as a void.

So why is there a black square in all these works? Because Bennett is asking whether any cultural artefact can truly inhabit a void, in other words whether any artwork can escape from the time and place of its making, escape from its history and transcend its cultural context. The general idea is that, no, it can’t, and this might be more true of Australian modern art than many other types…

A different work by Bennett is assigned a room of its own. Dominating the room is a characteristic example of the traditional heroic white conception of the discovery, claim and colonising of Australia, ‘The Founding of Australia 1788’ by Algernon Talmage from as late as 1937

‘The Founding of Australia 1788’ by Algernon Talmage (1937)

As you might expect any modern artist to do, Bennett subverts and interrogates this kind of pompous white triumphalism with a version of his own, titled Possession Island (Abstraction) (based on a different painting, ‘Captain Cook Taking Possession of the Australian Continent On Behalf of the British Crown (1770)’ by John Alexander Gilfillan).

Possession Island (Abstraction) by Gordon Bennett (1991)

As you can see, a once fluid realistic oil painting has been converted into a stippled black-and white image in the style of a blown-up newspaper illustration. The coloured bands do three things: 1) they mask the only indigenous figure in the original painting, who has thus been erased in the same way the indigenous presence was erased for so many centuries. All that is left is the drinks tray he was holding for the refreshment of his white master. 2) The precise rectangular shapes may or may not be a reference to Malevich, which I’ve just explained. 3) But I was intrigued to learn that the colours of the blocks are those of the Aboriginal flag. In my ignorance, I didn’t know that there was an aboriginal flag.

There’s another aspect to this. Tate have cannily displayed these works in a room with a window looking out across the River Thames towards St Paul’s Cathedral, which is bang opposite Tate Modern. Insofar as St Paul’s is a seat of state, religious and ceremonial power of the Australian colonial power, Britain, the sight of it juxtaposed with these stories of colonial repression and brutality amounts to a form of geographical satire.

View across the River Thames and Millennium Bridge to St Paul’s Cathedral from a room in Tate Modern

A bit more subtly, the window in question is a tall narrow one whose shape echoes the tall red rectangle in Bennett’s work. Conceptual and visual echoes and ironies are bouncing round this room.

Yhonnie Scarce

Arguably the best items in the exhibition are the set of enormous hanging fabrics by Yhonnie Scarce. Scarce is an Australian glass artist who is a descendant of the Kokatha and Nukunu people of South Australia. The idea behind the works is fairly simple but results in extraordinary pieces which, for me, dominated the exhibition.

Each work is a hugely magnified antique photo of members of Scarce’s family, blown up and printed onto bed linen. These are then displayed alongside blown glass artefacts relating to the images. In the photo below, the work on the left is ‘Remember Royalty: Papa Willy’ and is a photograph from 1920 showing Scarce’s great-grandfather, William, at work shearing sheep. The image is printed onto an antique woollen blanket, an obvious reference to, or invocation of, this labour. He worked hard all his life to support his 12 (!) children. The toolbox below the blanket contains actual tools (I noted shiny new spanners) mingled with glass-blown replicas of yams, traditional foodstuff of Will’s Kokatha people.

Two works from the series ‘Remember Royalty’ by Yhonnie Scarce

The work on the right follows the same patter: it is a vintage photo taken in around 1911 at the Koonibba Mission Schoolhouse and showing Scarce’s maternal grandparents and children. The wall label tells us that mission schools like this were dotted all across Australia where indigenous people were exposed to brutal regimes of cultural assimilation i.e. forced to wear European clothes and practice Christianity. In another act of care and tribute to her ancestors, the trunk below the printed sheet contains glass balls, each of which contains a horizon line and constellations: the artist is returning to her ancestors the connection with their land which deprived of during their lives.

There are four of these huge photo-sculptures (in the other two, Scarce’s blown glass artefacts are sewn into the fabric of the photos), and because of the immediacy of the images, and the directness and poignancy of their family stories, these were, for me, the standout works in the exhibition.

Three videos

1. Vernon Ah Kee

At the far end of the exhibition is a big long darkened room containing Vernon Ah Kee’s four-screen video installation ‘tall man 2010’. This splices together news footage of the protests and riots following the death in custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee on 26 November 2004, on Palm Island, an island off the coast of Queensland. Doomadgee died in police custody as a result of multiple injuries. In the protests that followed, the police station, local courthouse and police barracks were burnt down. Sergeant Chris Hurley, who arrested Doomadgee, was tried and acquitted for causing his death.

One of the central figures leading the protests was Lex Wotton, a member of the Palm Island Aboriginal Council. Ah Kee presents him as the ‘tall man’ – an Aboriginal term for a bogey man or spirit who elicits the truth from wrongdoers. Wotton later won a lawsuit, alongside other Palm Island residents, which found that the police had illegally discriminated against them. The State of Queensland paid them A$30 million compensation.

So, from what the wall labels tell us, it seems to be an equivalent of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May 2020. It is typical of the American-centric nature of all our media that the Floyd incident and movement it gave rise to massively entered Britain’s consciousness and cultural sphere (houses round where I live still have ‘Black Lives Matter’ posters in their windows) while the death of Doomadgee didn’t cause a ripple.

Still clip from ‘tall man’ by Vernon Ah Kee (2010)

On a practical level, the footage is continually punctuated by the bars used in the creation and editing of film footage and by the loud sonic whine which indicates to editors that there is no soundtrack. Unfortunately I have mild tinnitus and found this very loud, penetrating high-pitched whine made it impossible for me to be in the room.

2. Bonita Ely

In 1979 eco-feminist Bonita Ely travelled to Jabiluka in the Northern Territory and filmed this performance, titled ‘Jabiluka U02’. Here the Mirrar indigenous community has waged a decades-long campaign against plans to mine uranium in the Kimberley flood plain. To be frank, watching her dig a pile of sand in what looks like a park is a little underwhelming. But the wall label links it with ongoing struggles against Australia’s mining corporations, singling out two current instances: in 2019 the Australian government allowed the Adani company to develop a coal mine that will endanger the Barrier Reef. And in 2020 the mining company Rio Tinto deliberately destroyed rock shelters in the Juukan Gorge, holy to the Puutu Kunti Kurram and Pinikura peoples for thousands of years. I did hear about this in the British media. Why aren’t Rio Tinto boycotted? Why aren’t the people responsible for vandalism like this named and shamed?

3. Peter Kennedy and John Hughes

This is a long video which is shown at a completely different scale from the Vernon Ah Kee; that is shown across a huge screen dominating a very big wall; the Kennedy and Hughes video, by contrast, is shown on an old-fashioned TV. It addresses the history of white management, capitalism and institutionalised denial of indigenous rights, but I found it completely impossible to watch because of the highly repetitive, droning high-pitched soundtrack which eclipsed the contents and gave me a headache. Must be better ways to get your message across, guys.

Tracey Moffat

Filling one side of the big central room is a series of 24 large photos by Tracey Moffatt titled ‘Up in the Sky’, shot in 1997. They depict life in a rough and ready Outback town. The whole series can be viewed on the Tate website.

The curators say the subject of the series is the forced separations of Aboriginal families by government agencies i.e. taking indigenous babies from their families and giving them to white foster parents or, as in some of these photos, Catholic convents. The abducted babies became known as the Stolen Generations.

From ‘Up in the sky’ by Tracey Moffatt (1997)

But if you look at the whole set you’ll see that Moffatt’s photos do much more than that. Most of the photos are of poor whites, what Americans call ‘trailer trash’. They prompted upset and outrage at the gross injustice of all those stolen babies and broken families. But the pictures of the immediate present also triggered feelings about living that kind of life, in that kind of place, not dissimilar from the feelings triggered by the Chris Killip exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery. Imagine living there, in a one-horse town where the horse died long ago, leaving desolation and wasted lives.

It triggered one big thought which goes slightly against the grain of the show: this is that, whereas all of the works by all of the artists in the exhibition address the injustices done to and the tragedies suffered by the indigenous people, nowhere (I think) is there mention of the injustice done to the white people sent to Australia. Almost all of them were convicts or the soldiers sent to guard them.

According to Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore, some 160,000 convicts were sent from Britain to Australia during the 50-year existence of ‘The System’ of transportation, most of them the poorest of the poor who had never been more than ten miles from their places of birth. Suddenly they were transported to a different planet.

Imagine being a nineteen-year-old woman sentenced to transportation for stealing a loaf of bread, wrenched away from your family and place of birth and familiar surroundings and sent half way round the world in the company of criminal and violent strangers to a completely alien, unfamiliar and unfriendly landscape. Imagine being the young soldiers sent to guard them.

My point is that there’s a kind of double injustice at work here. First the injustice and cruelty of the forced transportation of over a hundred thousand Britons. And then the behaviour of these scared, angry, brutalised Brits, to the relatively defenceless native peoples they discovered. Brutality upon brutality. Horror doubled. It’s a terrible historical legacy and this exhibition really drums into your mind multiple threads of injustice, violence and cultural erasure which continue up to the present day.

Video

Most exhibition promotional videos are a zippy 30 seconds long. This one, at 14 minutes, is a more in-depth consideration of the issues and starts by explaining the 1992 High Court ruling in favour of Torres Strait Islander, featuring the man who brought the case, land-rights activist Edward Koiki Mabo, before going on to describe the practice of some of the artists in the show.

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by Simon on May 1, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Australia, Exhibition

Tagged A Preponderance of Aboriginal Blood, A Year In Art, A Year in Art: 1973, Aboriginal rock art, aborigine, Adani, AIATSIS map of Indigenous Australia. David R. Horton, Algernon Talmage, art, Australia, Australian High Court, Black Lives Matter, Bonita Ely, Captain Cook Taking Possession of the Australian Continent On Behalf of the British Crown, Chris Killip, colonisation, contemporary art, cultural erasure, Dale Harding, Dale Horton, Edward Koiki Mabo, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Empire Parliamentary Association, exhibition, fullblood, George Floyd, Gordon Bennett, half-blood, Helen Johnson, How to Cross the Void, indigenous Australians, indigenous people, Jabiluka, Jabiluka U02, John Alexander Gilfillan, John Hughes, John Mawurndjul, Judy Watson, Juukan Gorge, Kazimir Malevich, Kokatha people, Koonibba Mission Schoolhouse, Kuninjku, Lex Wotton, Malevich, Millennium Bridge, Mirrar people, modern art, Mulrunji Doomadgee, Nukunu people, Palm Island Aboriginal Council, Peter Kennedy, Pinikura people, Politics, Possession Island (Abstraction), Puutu Kunti Kurram people, quadroon, Queensland Native Police Force, Remember Royalty, Richard Doyle, Rio Tinto, Seat of Power, Sergeant Chris Hurley, St Paul's cathedral, Suprematism, tall man 2010, Tate Britain, Tate Modern, terra nullius, the black square, the Stolen Generations, Torres Island, Tracey Moffat, Transportation, Up in the Sky, Vernon Ah Kee, Yhonnie Scarce, Yuwi Country

Posted by Simon on May 1, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/05/01/a-year-in-art-australia-1992-tate-modern/

The Procession by Hew Locke @ Tate Britain

Every year Tate commissions established artists to create installations for its two London galleries. The ones which fill Tate Modern’s huge Turbine Gallery tend to get a lot of press. Less attention is devoted to the commission to fill the long hall or central atrium of Tate Britain. This year’s commission was awarded to well-established Black British sculptor Hew Locke. With a certain inevitability, a Black artist decided to cover the topics of race, slavery and empire.

The result is a big bold piece which fills the central hall of Tate Britain with a parade of mannequins – of men, women, children, horses – dressed in a spectacular array of clothes and costumes, designed, stitched together, a surreal mish-mash of fabrics and colours and patterns, created just for this show, and titled ‘The Procession’.

Installation view of ‘The Procession’ by Hew Locke (2022) (Photo by the author)

Like most Tate shows this one is accompanied by a wealth – possibly a rather overwhelming wealth – of explanation and interpretation. You can read:

Tate’s Hew Locke biography
Tate’s Introduction to The Procession
Tate’s fairly long Guide to The Procession
or watch the 8-minute video about its inspiration and creation

Introduction

To quote Tate:

‘The Procession’ invites visitors to “reflect on the cycles of history, and the ebb and flow of cultures, people and finance and power.” Tate Britain’s founder was art lover and sugar refining magnate Henry Tate. In the installation Locke says he ‘makes links with the historical after-effects of the sugar business, almost drawing out of the walls of the building,’ also revisiting his artistic journey so far, including, for example, work with statues, share certificates, cardboard, rising sea levels, Carnival and the military.

Throughout the long, busy work, visitors will see figures who travel through space and time. Here, they carry historical and cultural baggage – from evidence of global financial and violent colonial control embellished on their clothes and banners – alongside powerful images of some of the disappearing colonial architecture of Locke’s childhood in Guyana.

The installation takes inspiration from real events and histories but, overall, the figures invite us to walk alongside them, into an enlarged vision of an imagined future.

I must say I didn’t get any of this at all from actually walking round and along ‘The Procession’. The colours and the way some figures were riding on horses distantly reminded me slightly of Renaissance processions – a very ragtag, surreal distortion of one. But the main impression is of daunting, intimidatingly alien figures with masks or veiled faces or blank mannequin faces from a nightmarish horror sci-fi movie.

Installation view of ‘The Procession’ by Hew Locke (2022) (Photo by the author)

Exhibition guide

The exhibition guide explains that ‘The Procession’ is divided into into sections devoted to themes or topics, mostly about empire, colonialism and rebellion.

Carnival
Post-Colonial Trade
Ghosts Of Slavery
Environmental Disaster
Monuments To Empire
Revolution And Emancipation

These read like chapters from a book and that is very much what the guide turns the work into – a series of tableaux, each one exemplifying one of the themes listed above. Reading the guide you realise that an impressive amount of work has gone into selecting the themes, thinking about them and then crafting tableaux to represent them using an interesting variety of source materials.

Installation view of ‘The Procession’ by Hew Locke (2022) (Photo by the author)

Each element of each outfit, every bit of fabric, plus objects like the palanquin or banners or huge images of old share certificates painted onto fabric, each of these elements has a complex backstory. Some elements are from the white imperialists and business organisations which organised and profited from the slave trade and sugar production on slave-worked plantations in Guyana (where Locke grew up).

But others reference African culture, slave culture, and the post-slavery Black culture Hew himself grew up and experienced. All changed, transmogrified into a Surreal and often quite nightmarish vision of history collapsing in on itself. The friend I went with absolutely loved the workmanship of the fabrics, looking in detail at how different coloured fabrics, printed or painted with a bewildering variety of patterns, had been crafted, juxtaposed and so on.

But I was frightened. I found the whole thing ominous and nightmarish. Faceless figures threatening violent revenge.

Installation view of ‘The Procession’ by Hew Locke (2022) (Photo by the author)

The man below – one of two bearing a stake of wood from which hangs a small fabric basket containing the bust of a white man – he doesn’t look like he’s marching into “into an enlarged vision of an imagined future.” The small figures wearing veils of fabric in the first two images in this review don’t look like carefree toddlers in a playground; to me they look like the psychopathic dwarf in the movie ‘Don’t Look Now’.

Installation view of ‘The Procession’ by Hew Locke (2022)

The Surreal fusion of white, Black, Western and African aesthetics didn’t strike me as Rainbow Nation liberation but reminds me all-too-much of the bizarre post-civilisation outfits worn by the many rebel guerrilla movements which have characterised Africa since independence – voodoo believers dressed in Man Utd shirts and toting semi-automatics. Cold-eyed killers wielding machetes while wearing garish wigs and women’s dresses. Scroll through the first five pages of this website to see what I mean. Or:

Google images of African civil war outfits

Torture, death and dismemberment have come to millions of Africans wearing bizarre outfits, wigs, handbags, kids’ toys, makeup, machine guns and machetes. The deliberate mashup of Locke’s work might be intended to make all kinds of points about resistance to Western imperialism and economic and social norms, but – unfortunately, and unintentionally – reminded me of the hundreds of descriptions I’ve read of mind-boggling violence in African conflicts.

Maybe my imagination has been damaged by reading too many accounts of too many African civil wars, but this installation gave me the willies. Instead of liberal guilt, which I assume is the desired output, I just felt fear, fear of a world which will – in light of inevitable global climate change, the collapse of Third World countries and the resulting mass migration (which, the guide tells us, Locke references somewhere amid these garish costumes) – become more and more like this, multicultural incomprehension, social collapse, people living amid the rags and tatters of the old civilisation, inventing new cults, practicing horrific violence.

Sorry. That’s how it felt to me. The friend I went with felt none of this and just loved the fabrics, the patterns, the designs and how they’d been cunningly assembled. Either way it’s a striking installation. Go and decide for yourself.

Wars in Africa

I’ve read too many books about unbelievable cruelty, atrocity and horror in post-independence Africa.

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by Simon on October 12, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition

Posted by Simon on October 12, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/10/12/the-procession-hew-locke-tate-britain/

Cornelia Parker @ Tate Britain

Cornelia Parker (CBE, RA) is a very well-known and successful figure in British art. Born in 1956, she’s become famous for her ‘immersive’ i.e. BIG works. Above all she is a conceptual artist. What is conceptual art? According to the Tate website:

Conceptual art is art for which the idea (or concept) behind the work is more important than the finished art object. It emerged as an art movement in the 1960s and the term usually refers to art made from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s.

In some exhibitions you react to the painting or sculpture immediately, as an object in space which fills your visual cortex with sensations and impressions. You don’t necessarily have to read the wall labels. With conceptual art it is almost always vital to read the wall label in order to understand what you’re looking at. Sure, you could still respond naively and sensuously to the work’s appearance but you would be missing out on 99% of its meaning and intention.

The wonderful wall labels

This major retrospective of Parker’s career brings together almost 100 works, spanning the last 35 years. So that’s quite a lot of reading you have to do in order to understand almost every one of these pieces.

But a major feature of the exhibition is that the wall labels are written by Parker herself. Most wall labels at exhibitions are written by curators who, in our day and age, are obsessed with the same handful of issues around gender and ethnicity and lose no opportunity to bash the visitor over the head with reminders of Britain’s shameful, imperial, racist, slave-trading past etc etc.

So it is a major appeal of this exhibition that, instead of every single piece explained solely in terms of race or gender – as it would be if Tate curators had written them – Parker’s own wall labels are fantastically interesting, insightful, thought-provoking insights into her way of thinking and seeing the world. Instead of the world of art being reduced to a handful of worn-out ideas, Parker’s wall labels are as entertainingly varied as her subject matter, full of stories, anecdotes, bright ideas, explanations of technique, aims, collaborations.

They give you a really privileged insight into her worldview and into her decades’-long ability to be interested, curious, take everyday objects and have funny and creative ideas about how to transform them. After spending an hour and a half working through her thought processes for the different pieces, some of her creative spirit begins to rub off on you, you begin to see the everyday world the way she does, full of opportunities for disruptive and fun interventions. In this respect, this exhibition is one of the most genuinely inspiring I’ve ever been to.

Types of work

The exhibition includes immersive installations, sculptures, photographs, embroidery and drawings, as well as four large-scale, room-sized installations, and two rooms showing her art films. At the simplest, physical level, the pieces can be divided into two categories: Small and Large. Examples of the small will serve as an introduction to the large.

Introductory

In the downstairs atrium of Tate Britain stands a single sculpture, preparing you for the exhibition ahead.

The Distance (A Kiss with String Attached) by Cornelia Parker (2003) © Tate Photography

It is, of course, a life-size cast of Rodin’s sculpture, The Kiss, wrapped up in a mile of string. A vague symbolic gesture towards ‘the ties that bind’ people in relationships, maybe. In the nearby wall label Parker describes this as a ‘punk gesture’, which I found very significant. It’s the only time she mentions punk but she was just 20 when it hit, maybe at art school by then, so its attitude of really offensive, in-your-face irreverence must have taken her art school by storm. The point is, various later wall labels repeatedly say that she is interested in destruction and violence – but not violence against persons, against things. Her art does violence to inanimate objects in all kinds of inventive, creative and often very funny ways.

But there is, as so often, a further twist to the tail. Wrapping The Kiss in string is a relatively tame thing to do compared with Dada, Surrealist, Duchamp provocations from 100 years ago. It becomes more interesting when you learn that some opponents of conceptual art within the art world, fellow young irreverent artists, vandalised the original version of The Distance by cutting up the string into short sections, thus ‘liberating’ the sculpture.

And best of all, that Parker was undaunted and promptly gathered up all the cut-up pieces of string and tied them back together around a mysterious object at the centre, ‘a secret weapon’, which is unnamed and unknown.

‘The Distance (with concealed weapon)’ by Cornelia Parker (2003) © Cornelia Parker (Photo by the author)

Small

I’ll jump straight in and give examples.

‘The Negative of Words’ (1996)

Parker realised that when an engraver engraves words into silver, for example into a cup like the Wimbledon champion’s cups, tiny fragments or curls of silver are generated. This piece is a pile of the shavings thus created. Parker contacted a silversmith, who agreed to her proposal, and it took several months to accumulate enough shavings for her to create the little mound, with sprinkled outliers, which we see on display here. As she points out, each sliver represents a letter, is the trace of a letter, is the inverse of writing, of language. They are absences made solid. This idea really resonated with me as I admired this carefully created little mound and its sprinkled outliers.

‘The Negative of Words’ by Cornelia Parker (1996) © Cornelia Parker (Photo by the author)

‘Luck Runs out’ (1995)

In the case next to it is an old dictionary. Under careful supervision, Parker arranged for a shotgun loaded with dice to be fired into the back of the book. The die penetrated to different depths into the text and jammed most of the pages together. As it happens the post-shooting dictionary automatically fell open at a page about ‘luck’. Hence the title, The luck of the draw. The roll of the dice.

‘Luck Runs Out’ and ‘The Negative of Words’ by Cornelia Parker © Cornelia Parker (Photo by the author)

Apparently it’s part of a series titled ‘Avoided Objects’, so-called ‘object poems’ which ‘explore the fractured, unmade and unclassified’. The series explores ‘the denied and repressed’, which sounds a bit hackneyed and stale until she goes on to specify what that means in practice – the backs, underbellies or tarnished surfaces of things, which is much more interesting. Hence shooting this dictionary ‘in the back’.

‘Embryo Firearms’ (1995)

While in Hartford Connecticut, Parker asked to visit the factory where the famous Colt 45 handgun is made. She was surprised to discover the process began with blank featureless gun-shaped casts, before any working parts were added. She asked if she could have one and the Americans, obliging as ever, gave her two and gave them a nice smooth industrial polish. Adding the word ’embryo’ to firearm juxtaposes the birth of the gun with the general idea of the birth of a human being, alongside a tool which might potentially bring it to an end.

‘Embryo money’ (1996)

Fascinated by money, Parker asked permission to visit the Royal Mint in Pontyclun, Wales. She asked for some samples of coins before they were ‘struck’ i.e. had the monarch’s face, writing, value, corrugated edges and everything else added – just the blank dummy coins. Embryo money, before it has accrued any of the power which so dominates all our lives.

‘Embryo Firearms’ (1995) and ‘Embryo money’ (1996) by Cornelia Parker © Cornelia Parker (Photo by the author)

See what I mean by ‘conceptual’. You could relate to these just as intriguing objects, but the stories behind them – the anecdotes of Parker’s expeditions to interesting and unusual places to see industrial processes in action – add immeasurably to the enjoyment.

‘Exhaled cocaine’ (1996)

Parker developed a relationship with His Majesty’s Customs and Excise. She visited and got to know them at their Cardiff headquarters over a period of several months. One of the many, many types of contraband objects they confiscate are drugs. Parker persuaded them to let her have a seizure of cocaine after it had been incinerated. A million pounds worth of cocaine turned to ash, which is on display here, as a sad little pile.

In her wall label, Parker adds the coda, which you’d never have got from a curator, that she really loves the way Customs and Exercise destroy things in such a theatrical way, steamrollering fake Rolex watches or alcohol. ‘Like me, they are often symbolically killing things off.’ This kind of casual, candid opinion is a lovely insight into her way of thinking.

Inhaled cliffs’ (1996)

A personal favourite was ‘Inhaled cliffs’. She asked Customs about methods people use to smuggle stuff into the country, especially drugs, and discovered that some drugs can be used to ‘starch’ sheets, so a set of innocuous looking sheets turn out to be drenched in heroin, cocaine or other illicit substances which can be extracted once they’re safely in the country. This notion inspired ‘Inhaled cliffs’ in which Parker starched sheets with chalk from the white cliffs of Dover, ‘smuggling’ those great symbols of England into bed with her. She is tickled by the notion of ‘sleeping between cliffs’.

‘Exhaled cocaine’ (1996) and Inhaled cliffs’ (1996) by Cornelia Parker © Cornelia Parker (Photo by the author)

I’m focusing a bit much on these objects in cases. There were conventional things attached to the wall, prints, flat objects treated in various ways. Photographs, for example. On her way to her studio past Pentonville Prison she noticed workmen plastering cracks in the perimeter wall, creating vivid white abstract shapes. They then started to whitewash the wall as a whole so, before these irregular, crack-shaped gestures disappeared, she quickly took photos with her phone and developed a set of 12 prints which are hung here, titled ‘Prison Wall Abstract’.

Or the ‘Pornographic drawings’ (1996). As part of her ongoing conversations with HM Customs she asked for examples of contraband and they gave her (along with the bag of cocaine ashes) chopped up lengths of pornographic film. Parker dissolved the fragments in solvent to create her own ink. She used this ink to create Rorschach blots i.e. poured them on one side of a piece of folded paper, pressed the other side down on the inked side and reopened it to have a symmetrical image. For some reason, all the ones she made (or chose to display) came out ‘to be particularly explicit’.

It dawns on me that these works are beyond ‘conceptual’ in the sense that they might better be described as anecdotal. Often there isn’t a grand concept, project or goal behind them – there is happenstance and accident. Seeing an opportunity to do something interesting and seizing it.

The other obvious thing is that she’s about transforming objects from one state to another. She starts with ‘found objects’ – gun moulds, unstamped coins, porn movies, cocaine and so on – and, in the examples I’ve given, doesn’t even transform them herself, but recognises their artistic potential.

Medium

Using this technique of remodelling the existing and everyday, is a middle-sized work titled ‘Black Path (Bunhill Fields)’ from 2013. Parker describes playing hopscotch on pavements with her daughter. This led her to pay attention to pavements and to notice the antiquity of the old stone paving in Bunhill Fields near Old Street. She got permission to pour liquid rubber into the cracks in a path through Bunhill Fields. When the rubber dried she used the mould to make a metal cast, memorialising the captured cracks in bronze. She then suspended the mould on pins so that the cracks in the pavement hover a few inches above the floor, making it seem more spectral and ghostly. (It’s an accidental quirk that my photo of it features so many people’s feet.)

‘Black Path (Bunhill Fields)’ (2013) by Cornelia Parker © Cornelia Parker (Photo by the author)

Large

The interest in destruction I’ve mentioned earlier really comes to the fore in the three most famous room-sized installations in the exhibition. These are by way of being her greatest hits. They are:

Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988 to 89)
Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991)
Perpetual canon (2004)

Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991)

I’ll quote her wall label in its entirety:

We watch explosions daily, in action films, documentaries and on the news in never-ending reports of conflict. I wanted to create a real explosion, not a representation. I chose the garden shed because it’s the place where you store things you can’t quite throw away. The shed was blown up at the Army School of Ammunition. We used Semtex, a plastic explosive popular with terrorists. I pressed the plunger that blew the shed skywards. The soldiers helped me comb the field afterwards, picking up the blackened, mangled objects. In the gallery, as I suspended the objects one by one, they began to lose their aura of death and appeared reanimated. The light inside created huge shadows on the wall. The shed looked as if it was re-exploding or perhaps coming back together again. The first part of the title is a scientific term for all the matter in the universe that can’t be seen or measured. The second part describes a diagram in which a machine’s parts are laid out and labelled to show how it works.

I’ve seen photos of this many times. Seeing it in the flesh I realised several things:

it is a mobile – a very complex mobile, but in principle the same kind of thing my son makes to hang his origami figures from his ceiling
it has a cubic, rectangular shape i.e. it is the opposite of chaotically exploding outwards; it is very contained
this is achieved by hanging multiple objects from the same string, not just one
as people walk slowly respectfully round it the eddies of air they stir
and placing a single light bulb at the centre of it means not only that is casts shadows on the wall, but as the string move gently, so a) your perspective through the multiple layers of debris shifts and changes b) the shadows they cast on the wall subtly change

Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) by Cornelia Parker © Cornelia Parker (Photo by the author)

Perpetual canon (2004)

Again, I’ll give Parker’s words verbatim:

I was invited to make a work for a circular space with a beautiful domed ceiling. I first thought of filling it with sound. This evolved into the idea of a mute marching band, frozen breathlessly in limbo. Perpetual Canon is a musical term that means repeating a phrase over and over again. The old instruments had experienced thousands of breaths circulating through them in their lifetime. They had their last breath squeezed out of them when they were squashed flat. Suspended pointing upwards around a central light bulb, their shadows march around the walls. This shadow performance replaces the cacophonous sound of their flattened hosts. Viewers and their shadows stand in for the absent players.

Perpetual canon (2004) by Cornelia Parker © Cornelia Parker (Photo by the author)

The ghosts of music past. I was really taken by the idea that the shadows of us, the visitors, stand in for the long-dead players of these instruments.

Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988 to 1989)

Tate own this piece. In Tate’s words:

‘Thirty Pieces of Silver’ comprises over a thousand flattened silver objects, including plates, spoons, candlesticks, trophies, cigarette cases, teapots and trombones. All the objects were ceremoniously crushed by a steamroller at Cornelia Parker’s request. She then arranged the transformed silver artefacts into thirty disc-shaped groups, which are suspended about a foot from the floor by hundreds of fine wires. Each ‘disc’ is approximately ninety centimetres in diameter and they are always hung in orderly rows, although their overall configuration is adapted each time to the space in which the work is displayed. The title refers to the biblical story of how the apostle Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus in return for thirty pieces of silver.

And in Parker’s own words:

Drawn to broken things, I decided it was time to give in to my destructive urges on an epic scale. I collected as much silver plate as I could from car-boot sales, markets and auctions. Friends even donated their wedding presents. All these objects, with their various histories, shared the same fate: they were all robbed of their third dimension on the same day, on the same dusty road, by a steamroller. I took the fragments and assembled them into thirty separate pools. Every piece was suspended to hover a few inches above the ground, resurrecting the objects and replacing their lost volume. Inspired by my childhood love of the cartoon ‘deaths’ of Roadrunner or Tom and Jerry, I thought I was abandoning the traditional seriousness of sculptural technique. But perhaps there was another unconscious reason for my need to squash things. My home in east London was due to be demolished to make way for the M11 link road. The sense of anxiety lingers even now.

‘Thirty Pieces of Silver’ by Cornelia Parker (1988 to1989) © Cornelia Parker (Photo by the author)

Newer works

‘War Room’ (2015)

The biggest thing in the show is a big long room entirely lined with red paper with holes in, titled ‘War Room’, from 2015. As usual, you need to read the wall label to understand what this is about.

‘War Room’ by Cornelia Parker (2015) © Cornelia Parker (Photo by the author)

In Parker’s own words:

I was invited to make a piece of work about the First World War. I had always wanted to go to the poppy factory in Richmond, London. Artificial poppies have been made there since 1922. They are sold to raise for money for ex-military personnel and their families. When I visited the factory, I saw this machine that had rolls of red paper with perforations where the poppies had been punched out. The fact that the poppies are absent is poignant, because obviously a lot of people didn’t come back from the First World War, and other wars since. In this room there’s something like 300,000 holes, and there’s many more lives lost than that. I decided to make War Room like a tent, suspending the material like fabric. It’s based on the magnificent tent which Henry VIII had made for a peace summit with the French king in 1520, known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold. About a year later they were at war again.

The story, the anecdote, is, as usual, interesting but the resulting work less so.. You walk in, you walk round, you walk out. Meh. A slightly shimmery effect is created by having two layers of hole-y red paper hanging everywhere but…this is a minimal effect.

‘Magna Carta (An Embroidery)’ (2015)

One work dominates the penultimate room. It is an enormous, thirteen-metre long, hand-sewn embroidery of the Wikipedia page about Magna Carta.

‘Magna Carta (An Embroidery)’ by Cornelia Parker (2015) © Cornelia Parker (Photo by the author)

It is a collaborative work which involved over 200 volunteers including public figures, human rights lawyers, politicians and prisoners. On the wall is a list of the worthies who signed up to be involved, an entertaining list of the usual suspects: media-friendly left-of-centre politicians (Tom Watson, 55), actors, psychotherapists (Susie Orbach, 75), academics (Germaine Greer, 83), other high profile artists (Antony Gormley, 72), writers (Jeanette Winterson, 63, Philip Pullman, 75) and so on.

What struck me was how old all these people are. Our generation is declining, now, Cornelia. We’ve trashed the planet, wrecked the economy and degraded the political system for our children: best to withdraw tactfully and not keep on shouting and marching and trying to dominate everything. We’ve had our time. Over to a younger generation and hope they can do better.

The videos

There are two rooms featuring 7 or 8 art videos running consecutively. The best thing in the first room is a new six-minute video titled ‘FLAG 2022’ and made specially for this exhibition. Very entertainingly this shows the creation of a Union Jack by seamstresses in a factory only run backwards – so we see the British flag being systematically unsown and unstitched. It’s accompanied by a straight orchestral rendition of the hymn Jerusalem. Shame. It would have been funnier if Jerusalem had been played backwards, too – but maybe that would be a bit too 1960s, too much like the old avant-garde.

The second film room is about America. Oh dear. That far away country of which we hear so little, which is so rarely in the news, whose cultural products we so rarely get to see. This room contains:

One film which Parker shot at the annual Halloween Parade in New York, that city we so rarely hear about. Personally, I’d have though New York has enough artists of its own to do this kind of thing.
Another film showing supporters of Donald Trump milling about in New York outside Trump Tower sometime during his election campaign. I don’t know whether you’ve heard of Donald Trump? He was quite big in America, apparently.

Frankly, these films are a let-down. It’s disappointing to see Parker genuflecting to God’s Own Country – as if New York or America need the slightest bit more coverage or publicity than the saturation exposure they already enjoy in the British media, TV, radio, films, academia, all across the internet and the toxic marshes of social media. There are other countries in the world, you know.

I’d like to have shared FLAG or any of the others in t his review, but I can’t find any of them on the internet.

Politics

From here onwards – in the second half of the exhibition – politics emerges as an increasingly dominant theme.

As well as the flag movie, the British film room includes a film made in the empty chamber of the House of Commons in 2018 using a camera attached to a drone, titled ‘Left Right and Centre’. Not only did they make this film, but they made a film about the making of the film, in which I caught Parker telling us how damn difficult it was to make because of health and safety, fire risk assessment etc. When artists start to think they are heroes…

I thought the result was very underwhelming. The drone hovered over the table you see in front of the Speaker of the House’s chair, set between the two front benches, which usually has the Mace on it – except in this film it had been covered with copies of England’s daily papers, which fluttered in the downdraft of the drone’s little rotors.

As with Donald Trump, I am sick to death of Parliament, the succession of incompetent politicians we have had leading our nation for the past 12 years, and the corrupt newspapers which lie and distort in order to keep the ruling party in power. Watching a 10-minute film on the wretched subject of contemporary British politics went a long way to destroying the happy, creative, open impression inspired by the first half of the exhibition.

In 2017 Parker was the first woman to be appointed official artist for the General Election. In this role, she observed the election campaign leading up to the 8 June vote, meeting with politicians, campaigners and voters and producing artworks in response. She made several films during this period including the aforementioned drone movie, and one titled ‘Election Abstract 2018’, a documentation of Parker’s observations during the campaign, posted on her Instagram account.

None of this, to my mind, is as funny or inventive as flattening a load of silverware with a steamroller, or displaying a little pile of incinerated cocaine, or soaking sheets in white cliff chalk, or taking a mould of Bunhill pavement. It just looks and sounds like the news, with little or no inventiveness and no particular insight. British politicians are idiots. Our newspapers are studies in bias and lies. So what’s new?

My heart sank even further when I read that another of her films is titled ‘Chomskian Abstract 2007’ and is an interview with the American social critic and philosopher Noam Chomsky, apparently about ‘the entwined relationship between ecological disaster and capitalism’.

Oh dear God. It’s not that Chomsky’s wrong or that hyper-capitalism driven on by American corporations and banks is not destroying the planet; it’s just that he is such a bleeding obvious choice for Great Man of the Left to interview. And so very, very, very old (born in 1928, Noam Chomsky turns 93 this year).

Is this the best Parker can do in the field of ‘radical’ or oppositional politics – interview a 93-year-old? It’s like waking up one morning and deciding you need to make a film about the environment and, after careful consideration, deciding you’d like to interview David Attenborough (aged 96) on the subject. Topics, and interviewees, don’t come more crashingly obvious than this.

Hundreds and hundreds of interviews with Noam Chomsky on YouTube

Each year thousands and thousands of students in Britain graduate from international studies, politics or environmental courses. It would have been so much more interesting to interview the young, the future generation, and get their point of view rather than the done-to-death, decrepit old.

And he’s another Yank for God’s sake. What is it with the British cultural establishment and their cringing obeisance to American culture, artists, film-makers, politicians and intellectuals. Of the 200 contributors to the Magna Carta embroidery, in their summary of the show the curators single out just two – Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (who stitched ‘user’s manual’ into the embroidery) and Edward Snowden (who stitched the word ‘Liberty’).

Notice anything about them? Yes, they’re both American. Americans just seem carry more weight with Britain’s art establishment. They have a little more human value than mere Brits like you and me. More pizzazz, more glamour.

Lastly, what has Chomsky actually changed in his 50-odd years of railing against the American government and global capitalism? Nothing. Come to that, what good does getting 200 media-friendly worthies to contribute bits to a 13-metre-long embroidery achieve? Nothing. It’s a feel-good exercise for everyone involved and maybe it makes some of the gallery visitors feel warm and fuzzy and virtuous, too. Which is nice, but…

But meanwhile, out in the real world, Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng are destroying the economy, ruining Britain’s standing in the financial world, and declaring war on the poor, the unwell, the vulnerable, even trashing support among their own middle-class, mortgage-paying supporters, in a zombie march of ideologues divorced from reality.

Flying a drone round the House of Commons or stitching a room-length embroidery are not only feeble responses to the world we live in but, worse, I found them imaginatively limiting and cramped. If you’re going to tackle the terrible world of contemporary politics, at least do it with some style and imagination. Old newspaper photos of Theresa May or Jeremy Corbyn didn’t take me anywhere new – unlike the pile of silver shavings or a cast of Bunhill pavement or most of the pieces in the first half of the show, which opened magic doors in my mind.

Maybe Parker should stick to what she does best – blowing things up. Guy Fawkes Night is coming. Just a thought…

More Tate Britain reviews

More Tate Britain reviews

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by Simon on October 10, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition

Tagged America, Antony Gormley, art, art exhibition, art film, art movie, Avoided Objects, Black Path (Bunhill Fields), capitalism, Cardiff, Chomskian Abstract 2007, cocaine, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, Colt 45, conceptual art, conceptual artist, Cornelia Parker. British art, Dada, David Attenborough, Donald Trump, drawings, Duchamp, East London, ecological disaster, Edward Snowden, Election Abstract 2018, embroidery, Embryo Firearms, Embryo money, Environment, Exhaled cocaine, exhibition, First World War, FLAG 2022, Germaine Greer, gun, Guy Fawkes Night, Henry VIII, His Majesty's Customs and Excise, House of Commons, immersive installation, Inhaled cliffs, installation, Jeanette Winterson, Jeremy Corbyn, Jerusalem, Jesus, Jimmy Wales, Judas Iscariot, Kwasi Kwarteng, Left Right and Centre, Liz Truss, London, Luck Runs out, M11 link road, Magna Carta, Magna Carta (An Embroidery), mobile, musical instruments, New York, New York Halloween Parade, Noam Chomsky, object poems, Pentonville Prison, Perpetual canon, Philip Pullman, photography, Pontyclun, poppy factory, Pornographic drawings, Prison Wall Abstract, Richmond, Rodin, sculpture, Semtex, steamroller, surrealist, Susie Orbach, Tate, Tate Britain, the Army School of Ammunition, The Distance (A Kiss with String Attached), the Field of the Cloth of Gold, The Kiss, The Negative of Words, the Royal Mint, Theresa May, Thirty Pieces of Silver, Tom Watson, Union Jack, Wales, War Room, White Cliffs of Dover, Wikipedia

Posted by Simon on October 10, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/10/10/cornelia-parker-tate-britain/

Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity (2005)

This is the catalogue of a major exhibition of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portraits held at Tate Britain back in 2005. I went, loved the exhibition and bought this catalogue. In my opinion the written content of the catalogue is poor, but the colour reproductions of 100 or so of Reynolds’s best paintings are spectacular.

The catalogue contains a biography of Reynolds by Martin Postle and four essays by Reynolds scholars:

‘The Modern Apelles’: Joshua Reynolds and the Creation of Celebrity by Martin Postle
Reynolds, Celebrity and The Exhibition Space by Mark Hallett
‘Figures of Fame’: Reynolds and the printed Image by Tim Clayton
‘Paths of Glory’: Fame and the Public in Eighteenth-Century London by Stella Tillyard

The essays are followed by some 100 full-colour reproductions, divided into the following sections:

With separate sections of images devoted to:

Reynolds and the Reproductive Print
Reynolds and the Sculpted Image

The concept of celebrity

As the title suggests, the idea is somehow to tie Reynolds’s 18th century art and career to 21st century ideas of ‘celebrity’. In my opinion all four essays fail to do this. Despite frequently using sentences with the word ‘celebrity’ in them, the catalogue nowhere really explains what ‘celebrity’ is.

The authors have a hard time really distinguishing it from the notion of ‘fame’ and the pursuit of ‘fame’ and the risks of ‘fame’ – subjects which have been thoroughly discussed since ancient Greek times.

In Greek mythology Pheme was the personification of fame and renown, her favour being notability, her wrath being scandalous rumors… She was described as ‘she who initiates and furthers communication’… A tremendous gossip, Pheme was said to have pried into the affairs of mortals and gods, then repeated what she learned, starting off at first with just a dull whisper, but repeating it louder each time, until everyone knew. In art, she was usually depicted with wings and a trumpet… In Roman mythology, Fama was described as having multiple tongues, eyes, ears and feathers by Virgil (in Aeneid IV line 180 ff.) and other authors.

In other words, the concept of ‘fame’ and the way it unavoidably attracts a spectrum of public comment, from dignified praise at one end through to scurrilous rumour at the other end – is as old as Western civilisation.

In my opinion the authors struggle to establish a really clear distinction between these multiple and time-honoured notions of fame with all its consequences, and their attempt to shoe-horn modern-day ‘celebrity’ into the picture.

The whole thing is obviously an attempt by Tate to make Reynolds and his paintings more ‘relevant’ to a ‘modern’ audience, maybe to attract in those elusive ‘younger’ visitors which all arts venues need to attract to sustain their grants. Or to open a new perspective from our time back to his, which makes his society, his aims and his paintings more understandable in terms of modern concepts.

I can see what they’re trying to do, and it is obvious that the four authors have been told to make as many snappy comparisons between the society of Reynolds’s day and our own times as possible – but flashy references to the eighteenth-century ‘media’ or to Reynolds’s sitters getting their ‘fifteen minutes of fame’, aren’t enough, by themselves, to give any insight. In fact, these flashy comparisons tend to obscure the complexity of 18th century society by railroading complex facts and anecdotes into narrow 21st notions and catchphrases.

Being modish risks becoming dated

The authors’ comparisons have themselves become dated in at least two ways:

the ‘modern’ celebrities they invoke have dated quickly (David Beckham is given as a current example)
it was written in 2005, before the advent of social media, Instagram, twitter etc, so has itself become completely out of date about the workings of ‘modern celebrity’

There is a third aspect which is – Who would you trust to give you a better understanding of social media, contemporary fame, celebrity, influencers, tik tok and so on – a social media marketing manager, a celebrity journalist or… a starchy, middle-aged, white English academic?

There is a humorous aspect to listening to posh academics trying to get down wiv da kids, and elaborately explaining to their posh white readership how such things as ‘the media’ work, what ‘the glitterati’ are, and showing off their familiarity with ‘the media spotlight’ – things which, one suspects, library-bound academics are not, in fact, all that familiar with.

The authors’ definitions of celebrity

The authors attempt numerous definitions of celebrity:

Reynolds’s attitude towards fame, and how it was inextricably bound up with a concern for his public persona, or what we today would call his ‘celebrity‘ status.

So Reynolds was concerned about his fame, about building a professional reputation and then defending it, but wasn’t every other painter, craftsman and indeed notable figure of the time? As Postle concedes:

In this respect he was not untypical of a whole range of writers, actors and artists who regarded fame as the standard for judging the worthiness of their own performance against the achievements of the past.

Postle goes on to try and distinguish fame from celebrity:

However, Reynolds [achieved fame] by using the mechanisms associated with what has become known as ‘celebrity‘, a hybrid of fame driven by commerce and the cult of personality.

Hmm. Is he saying no public figures prior to Joshua Reynolds cultivated a ‘cult of personality’ or that no public figures tried to cash in on their fame? Because that is clearly nonsense. And putting the word celebrity in scare quotes doesn’t help much:

Reynolds pandered to the Prince [of Wales]’s thirst for ‘celebrity‘ and fuelled his narcissistic fantasies.

The author doesn’t explain what he means by ‘celebrity’ in this context or why the prince thirsted for it and how he was different in this respect from any other 18th century aristocrat who ‘thirsted’ for fame and respect.

Through portraits such as these [of the Duc d’Orleans], Reynolds openly identified with fashionable Whig society; the Georgian ‘glitterati’ – liberal in the politics, liberated in their social attitudes, and libidinous in their sexual behaviour.

Does use of the word ‘glitterati’ add anything to our understanding?

He was also the first artist to pursue his career in the media spotlight.

‘Media spotlight’? Simply using modern clichés like ‘media spotlight’ and ‘celebrity’ and ‘glitterati’ didn’t seem to me to shed much light on anything. The reader wants to ask a) what do you understand by ‘media spotlight’? b) in what way did Reynolds pursue his career in a media spotlight?

As experience of the modern media tells us, a sure sign that an individual’s fame has been transmuted into ‘celebrity’ is when press interest in his or her professional achievements extends to their private and social life.

I’m struggling to think of a time when there hasn’t been intrusive interest in the lives of the rich and famous, and when it hasn’t been recorded in scurrilous satires, squibs, poems.

People gossiped about Julius Caesar, about all the Caesars. We have written records of the way Athenians gossiped about Socrates and his wife. Prurient interest in the personal lives of anyone notable in an urban environment go back as far as we have written records.

Here’s another definition:

In a process that seems to prefigure the ephemeral dynamics of heroism and redundancy found in today’s celebrity culture, the exploitation of celebrity typified by Reynolds’s representation of [the famous soldier, the Marquess of] Granby depended not only on the glorification, in portrait form, of individuals who had already gained a certain kind of renown within the wider realms of urban culture, but also on a continual replenishment – from one year to the next – of this hyperbolic imagery of bravery, beauty and fame.

I think he’s saying that visitors to the annual exhibitions liked to see new pictures – or, as he puts it with typical art scholar grandiosity, ‘a continual replenishment of this hyperbolic imagery’.

‘The ephemeral dynamics of heroism and redundancy found in today’s celebrity culture’? Does that tortuous definition have any relevance to Kim Kardashian, Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Rihanna et al?

What these authors are all struggling to express is that Reynolds made a fabulously successful career by painting the well-known and eminent people of his day, making sure to paint army or naval heroes as soon as they returned from famous victories, making sure he painted portraits of the latest author after a hit novel or play, painting well-known courtesans, carefully associating his own name (or brand) with success and fame.

It was a dialectical process in which Reynolds’s portraits, often hung at the annual Royal Academy exhibition – which was itself the talk of the town while it lasted – promoted both the sitter and their fame, but also kept Sir Joshua’s name and reputation as Top Painter Of The Famous continually in the public eye.

That’s what the essay writers are trying to say. But you have to wade through a lot of academic rhetoric to get there. Take this questionable generalisation thrown out by Stella Tillyard, which sounds reasonable, until you start to think about it.

Like so much else that defines us in Europe and America now, celebrity appears to have been made in the eighteenth century and in particular in eighteenth century London, with its dozens of newspapers and print shops, its crowds and coffee houses, theatres, exhibitions, spectacles, pleasure gardens and teeming pavements. (Stella Tillyard, p.61)

‘Like so much else that defines us in Europe and America now’? What would you say defines modern society in 2020? I’d guess the list would include the internet, mobile phones, social media, webcams and digital technology generally, big cars, long-haul flights, cheap foreign holidays, mass immigration, multi-cultural societies, foreign food… things like that.

Quite obviously none of these originated in eighteenth century London.

Tillyard’s essay is the best of the four but it still contains highly questionable assertions. She thinks there is a basic ‘narrative’ of ‘celebrity’ which is one of rise, stardom, fall and rise again. The examples she gives are Bill Clinton getting into trouble because of Monica Lewinsky, and the footballers Francesco Totti and David Beckham. She thinks this basic narrative arc echoes the story of Jesus Christ, rising from obscurity, gaining fame, being executed, and rising from the dead. You have to wonder what drugs she is on.

Nonetheless, Tillyard’s is the best essay of the four because she’s an actual historian and so has a wide enough grasp of the facts to make some sensible points. She also gives the one and only good definition of celebrity in the book when she writes that:

Celebrity was born at the moment private life became a tradeable public commodity. (p.62)

Aha. Right at the end of the four essays we get the first solid, testable and genuinely insightful definition of celebrity.

According to Tillyard’s definition, the really new thing about celebrity is not the interest in gossip about the rich and famous – that, as pointed out, has been with us forever – it is that this kind of fame can be packaged into new formats and sold. It has become part of the newly mercantile society of the 18th century.

Celebrity, among other things, is about the commodification of fame, about the dissemination of images representing the individual celebrity, and about the collective conversations and fantasies generated by these processes. (p.37)

The assertion is that Reynolds was able to capitalise on his reputation. He made money out of it. He was able to exploit the new aspects of mid-18th century fame in order to build up a successful business and make a fortune.

He developed a process for making his portraits well known. The lead element in this was ensuring they were prominently hung at the annual exhibition of paintings by members of the new Royal Academy and so became the subject of the enormous amount of comment the exhibition attracted in the scores of newspapers, magazines, cartoons, lampoons, caricatures, poems and plays which infested Georgian London.

Deftly riding this tide of gossip and talk and critical comment, Reynolds was able to assure his sitters that he would make them famous – and he made himself famous in the process. And, as a result, he was able to charge a lot of money for his portraits.

He was able to turn the insubstantial, social quality of ‘fame’ into hard cash. That’s how the argument goes. I’ve put it far more plainly than any of these four writers do, and it’s an interesting point, but still begs a lot of questions…

Robert Orme’s 15 minutes of fame

When Postle says that the soldier Robert Orme got his ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ (p.27) it strikes me as being a flashy but misleading reference.

Andy Warhol’s expression, ‘in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes’, refers very specifically to the 15-minute time slots allocated on the kind of American TV programmes which are punctuated every 15 minutes or so with ad breaks. Its merit derives from its source in a very specific technology and at a very specific moment in that technology (the later 1960s).

Whereas Robert Orme took part in an important battle of the Seven Years War (surviving the massacre of General Edward Braddock’s forces by French and Indians in July 1755), returned to England and was for a while feted and invited to dinners to give first-hand accounts of the massacre.

OK, so interest in Orme petered out after a while, but his story hardly conforms to the ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ description in the very precise, TV-age way Warhol had intended.

It’s an example of the way the authors are prepared to twist the historical record in order to shoehorn in their strained comparisons with modern ‘celebrity’ or the ‘glitterati’ or ‘the media spotlight’.

My point is that just chucking modern buzzwords at historical events doesn’t help us understand the historical events and doesn’t shed much light on the buzzwords or the ideas behind them, either. Not without a much more detailed analysis, anyway.

What was new about 18th century ‘media’

The one place in the four essays which comes alive i.e. presents new facts or insights, is in historian Stella Tillyard’s essay, where she explains that a new concept of ‘fame’ was being driven by some genuinely new developments in mass publication. She suggests four factors which account for the rise of a new type of fame in the mid-18th century:

1. A limited monarchy – the mystique surrounding the Divine Right of Kings which had clung to the Stuart Monarchy (1660-1714) drained away from the stolid Hanoverian monarchs who replaced them after 1714. Their powers were circumscribed from the start by Parliament and this made them much more human, much more worldly and, well, sometimes boring figures, for example. George III, widely known as Farmer George.

2. Royal glamour migrated – instead of surrounding the monarch in a nimbus of glory the human desire to have glamorous figures to look up to and gossip about migrated to new categories of ‘star’ or ‘celebrity’, namely top military figures, successful actors and even writers.

3. The lapse of the Licensing Act left the press a huge amount of freedom. By 1770 there were 60 newspapers printed in London every week, all looking for gossip and tittle tattle to market. Combined with a very weak libel law which allowed almost any rumour and speculation to be printed. Well before the tabloids were invented, the taste for an endless diet of celebrity tittle tattle was being catered to.

4. A public interested in new ways of thinking about themselves or others. This is the tricksiest notion, but Tillyard argues that this huge influx of new printed matter, combined with shops full of cheap prints, to make literate urban populations think about themselves and their roles as citizens of a busy city, and as consumers, in new ways.

Now all this chimes very well with the picture painted in Ian McIntyre’s brilliant biography of Reynolds, which clearly shows how almost every incident, not only from his personal life but of the lives of all his famous friends (e.g. the writer Dr Johnson, the actor David Garrick, the historian Edmund Gibbon, the poet Oliver Goldsmith) was quickly leaked to scurrilous journalists, who reported them in their scandal sheets, or made cartoons or comic poems about them.

Reynolds’s world was infested with gossip and rumour.

By contrast with Tillyard’s authoritative historian’s-eye view, Postle’s art critic assertions are less precise and less persuasive:

Reynolds grew up in an age that witnessed the birth of modern journalism.

Did he, though? ‘Modern’ journalism?

Googling ‘birth of modern journalism’ you discover that ‘modern journalism’ began with a piece written by Defoe in 1703. Or was it during the American Civil War in the 1860s? Or maybe it was with Walter Lippmann, writing in the 1920s, often referred to as the ‘father of modern journalism’?

In other words, the birth of ‘modern’ journalism happened more or less any time you want it to have done, any time you need to add this cliché into your essay to prop up your argument. And that little bit of googling suggests how risky it is making these kinds of sweeping assertions.

In fact it suggests that any generalisation which contains the word ‘modern’ is dodgy because the term ‘modern’ itself is so elastic as to be almost meaningless. Historians themselves date ‘the modern period’ to the 1500s. Do you think of the Elizabethan era as ‘modern’?

The modern era of history is usually defined as the time after the Middle Ages. This is divided into the early modern era and the late modern era. (Define modern era in history)

Postle’s assertion that there was something uniquely and newly journalistic about Reynolds’s era sounds fine until you think of earlier periods – take the turn-of-the 18th century and the reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714) which was packed with coffee house publications and scurrilous poems written against each other by leading figures. Alexander Pope’s entire career exemplifies a world of literary gossip and animosity.

Going further back, wasn’t the court of Charles II the subject of all kinds of cartoons, pictures, scurrilous paintings and poems and plays? Lots of John Dryden’s poems only make sense if you realise they’re about leading figures of the day, either praising or blaming them. During the British civil wars (1637-51) there was an explosion of pamphlets and leaflets and poems and manifestos denouncing the actions of more or less every notable figure, and giving a running commentary on the political developments of the day. Wasn’t Shakespeare’s time (1590 to 1615) one of rumour and gossip and pamphlet wars?

And in fact I’ve just come across the same idea, on page 4 of Peter H. Wilson’s vast history of the Thirty Years War, where he writes:

From the outset, the conflict attracted wide interest across Europe, accelerating the early seventeenth-century ‘media revolution’ that saw the birth of the modern newspaper.
(Europe’s Tragedy by Peter H. Wilson, page 4)

So surely the widespread availability of gossip sheets and scandal mongering publications was a matter of degree not kind. Artists of the late-17th century (van Dyck, Peter Lely, Godfrey Kneller) had earned types of ‘fame’ and certainly tried to capitalise on it. By Reynolds’s day there were just more outlets for it, more magazines, newspapers, journals – reflecting a steadily growing urban population and market for all things gossip-related. Between 1650 and 1750 the British population increased, the population of London increased, the number of literate people increased, and so the market for reading matter increased.

So when Postle asserts that newspapers played an increasingly important part in the critical reception of art, well, they played an increasingly important role in the critical reception of everything, such as war and politics and religion, such as the Seven Years War, the American War of Independence, the French Revolution and every other kind of debate and issue.

1. That is what newspapers do – tell people what’s going on and editorialise about it – and 2. there were more and more of them, because the population was growing, and the number of literate consumers was steadily growing with it.

Reynolds didn’t invent any of this. He just took advantage of it very effectively.

Reynolds’s strategies for success

But was Reynolds unique?

As mentioned above, the four essayists have clearly received a brief to make Reynolds sound as modern and edgy and contemporary and down with the kids as possible.

But the tendency of the essays is also to try and make Reynolds sound unique – in his painterly ambition, in the way he used connections and pulled strings to paint famous sitters, promoted himself socially (by being a member of many clubs and inviting all the famous men and women of the time to large dinners), promoted his work through public exhibitions, tried to wangle key painting positions to the royal family, and by having prints made of his portraits which could be sold on to a wider audience.

The trouble is that – having just read Ian McIntyre’s brilliant biography of Reynolds which presents an encyclopedic overview of his times, its clubs, newspapers, magazines, his colleagues and rivals, of the mechanisms of a career in art and an in-depth overview of all Georgian society – I realise these were the standard procedures of the day.

For example, the authors point out that Reynolds was keen to paint portraits of famous people to boost his career – but what portrait painter of the day wasn’t? Allan Ramsay and Thomas Gainsborough, to name just two contemporary painters, lobbied hard to win aristocratic patrons, to promote their portraits to other potential clients, to expand their client base, and so on. It was a highly competitive and commercial world.

The catalogue contains sections on the portraits of aristocratic ladies, military heroes and courtesans as if Reynolds had invented the idea of painting these kinds of figures – but paintings of aristocrats go back at least as far as the Renaissance, and statues of emperors, notable figures and military leaders go back through the ancient Romans to the Greeks.

There’s a section devoted to showing how Reynolds used prints extensively to promote his career, not only here but abroad, where British art prints commanded good prices. (One of the few new things I learned from the essays was that British mezzotinting was so highly regarded as to become known as la maniere anglaise, p.51)

But all his rivals and colleagues did just the same, too – otherwise there wouldn’t have been a thriving community of printmakers and of printbuyers.

And the authors strain to prove that the kind of high-profile aristocrats, military leaders, and top artists-writers-actors of the day that Reynolds portrayed were often discussed, profiled, ridiculed and lampooned in London’s countless scurrilous newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, poems, broadsides, gossip columns and so on.

But this was just as true of all the notable figures that all the other portrait painters of his day painted. It was an extremely gossipy society.

In other words, none of the activities the authors attribute to Reynolds was unique to him – they were being energetically carried out by scores of rivals and colleagues in the swarming ant hill of rivalry and competition that was Georgian London. What is interesting, is the extent to which Reynolds did all these things best (when he did), or where he failed, or where he pioneered a new aspect of this or that activity.

Unfortunately, the four authors don’t really have much space to make their cases. The four essays are relatively short. They have nowhere like the 550 closely-typed pages that Ian McIntyre has in his masterful biography of Reynolds. Therefore, to anyone who’s read McIntyre, the four essays come over as fleeting and superficial sketches of subjects and issues which deserve to be dealt with in much, much greater detail if you want to understand why Reynolds was the towering figure that he was.

It wasn’t that he did all these activities listed above – it’s that he did many of them better, more comprehensively, and more systematically than his rivals.

And also that he just worked harder at it. He was extremely disciplined and professional, working a solid 6 or 7 hour days, every day, often on Sundays. He produced, on average, well over one hundred commissions a year, an extraordinary workrate. This isn’t mentioned anywhere in the essays, but it is a key reason for his success.

Or the even more obvious fact that a his success was down to the fact that he was, quite simply, the best portrait painter of his time. He may well have adopted the canny career strategies listed above, but they’d have been meaningless if he hadn’t also been a painter of genius.

Art scholarship prose style

This section contains no facts and is devoted to an analysis and skewering of pretentious artspeak. Art scholar prose is very identifiable. It has at least three elements:

use of fashionable, pretentious buzzwords such as subvert, interrogate, engage, gendered, identity, desire, site, gaze, other
combined with a curiously starchy, old-fashioned locutions such as whilst, amongst
thin actual content

1. Buzzwords

In terms of his desire to associate himself with the celebrity of others, the most compelling paintings by Reynolds are surely his portraits of prostitutes… (p.29)

‘Wish’ wouldn’t be a better word?

When the ancient philosopher, Socrates, visited the artist’s house with friends, the courtesan was to be found under the gaze of the painter (p.29)

The word ‘gaze’ now has the adjective ‘male’ attached to it in all contexts, and is always a bad thing.

[At the new public exhibitions of the 1760s] the visitor’s encounter with the painted images of celebrities was crucially informed by those other burgeoning cultural sites of the period, the newspaper and the periodical. (p.35)

Do you think of a newspaper or magazine you read as a cultural site? Alliteration is always good, makes your ideas sound grander and more important.

In arranging that his pictures of such women [the royal bridesmaids at the wedding of George III and Queen Charlotte]… Reynolds… was contributing to, and trading upon, a burgeoning cult of aristocratic celebrity within the sites and spaces of urban culture. (p.39)

Tillyard in particular likes the word and idea of the ‘site’:

In response to the overwhelming attention of the London public [Jean-Jacques Rousseau] took himself off to the wilds of Derbyshire and began to write his Confessions, in which he demanded the right to be heard on his own terms rather than to become the site for others’ imaginings. (p.66)

Omai [a South Sea islander Reynolds painted] is both sophisticate and innocent, celebrity and savage, an eloquent but mute subject whose lack of the English language and inability to write allowed his audience and the picture’s viewers to make him a site for their own imaginings. (p.69)

It is surprising that Omai isn’t taken as an example of The Other, an almost meaningless word commonly used to describe anyone who isn’t a privileged white male.

The press functioned as one vital counterpart to the exhibition space in terms of what was emerging as a recognisably modern economy of celebrity… (p.37)

The ‘modern economy of celebrity’ sounds impressive but what does it mean, what is an ‘economy of celebrity’ (and remember the warning about using the word ‘modern’ which is generally an empty adjective used solely for its sound, to make the text sound grand and knowledgeable).

Reynolds painted a number of portraits of aristocratic patrons such as Maria, Countess Waldegrave and Elizabeth Keppel. This allows art scholar Mark Hallett to write:

In being invited to track the shifting imagery of such women as Keppel, Bunbury and Waldegrave, attentive visitors to the London exhibition rooms thus became witness to an extended process of pictorial and narrative transformation, choreographed by Reynolds himself, in which his sitters became part of a gendered, role-playing theatre of aristocratic celebrity that was acted out on an annual basis in the public spaces of the exhibition room. (p.39)

If you read and reread it, I think you realise that this long pretentious sentence doesn’t actually tell you anything. It is prose poetry in the tradition of the mellifluous aesthete, Walter Pater, just using a different jargon.

‘Narrative’, ‘gendered’, ‘theatre’, ‘spaces’ are all modish critical buzzwords. What does ‘gendered’ even mean? That some portraits were of women and some of men? Hmm. And a gallery isn’t really a theatre, no matter how hard art scholars wish their working environment was more jazzy and exciting. It’s a gallery. It consists of pictures hung on a wall. Therefore to say a gallery is a ‘role-playing theatre’ is simply a literary analogy, it is a type of literary artifice which makes absolutely no factual addition to our knowledge.

Translated, that sentence means that regular visitors to the Royal Academy exhibition often saw portraits of the same famous sitters and so could judge different artists’ treatment of them, or gossip about how their appearance changed from year to year. That’s what ‘pictorial and narrative transformation’ means.

The artist’s portrait of Granby can now be understood as just one element within an unfolding iconography of military celebrity that was being articulated by the artist in the exhibition space during the 1760s.

Translated, this means that Reynolds painted many portraits of successful military heroes. As did lots and lots of other portrait painters of the time. But it sounds more impressive the way Hallett expresses it using key buzzwords.

We can even suggest that such details as the Duchess [of Devonshire]’s ‘antique’ dress and rural surroundings… transform her into a figure of pastoral fantasy, a delicately classicised icon of aristocratic otherness… (p.43)

Ah, ‘the Other’ and ‘otherness’, it was the last empty space on my bullshit bingo card. What does ‘otherness’ mean here? That aristocrats aren’t like you and me? That, dressed up in fake Greek robes, leaning against a classical pillar in a broad landscape, they seem like visions from another world? Better to say ‘otherness’. Makes it sound as if you understand complex and only-hinted-at deeply intellectual ideas (taken, in fact, from Jacques Lacan and other French theorists).

2. Starchy prose style

It’s peculiar the way art scholars combine these flashy buzzwords from Critical Theory (interrogate, subvert, gender, identity, The Other) with creaky old phrases which sound as if they’ve come from the mouth of a dowager duchess.

It’s as if Lady Bracknell had read a dummy’s guide to Critical Theory and was trying to incorporate the latest buzzwords into her plummy, old-fashioned idiolect. For example, art scholars always prefer ‘within’ to ‘in’, ‘amongst’ to among, and ‘whilst’ to while – versions of common English words which help them sound grander.

Some contemporary critics thought Reynolds’s experiments with oil and painting techniques meant his works would eventually decay and disintegrate. Mark Hallett says:

The fact that an exhibition including paintings such as these is now taking place, more than two hundred years after Reynolds’s death, helps put paid to such aspersions.

‘Helps put paid to such aspersions’? Isn’t that the voice of Lady Bracknell? ‘I should certainly hope, Mr Moncrieff, that in future you shall keep your aspersions and animadversions to yourself.’

3. Thin content

See above where I’ve highlighted the relative lack of new or interesting insights in the four critical essays, which can’t be concealed by tarting them up with references to the eighteenth century ‘glitterati’ or Andy Warhol.

Sometimes the essays descend to the bathetic. When we read that scholar Richard Wendorf has written a paper in which he observes that

Reynolds was adept at cultivating patrons through observing the rules of polite society

we are straying close to the University of the Bleeding Obvious.

When we learn that Reynolds sometimes flouted these rules in order to create a Bohemian effect, in order to copy the more raffish end of the aristocratic spectrum of behaviour, it feels like a variation on the obvious, and hardly something which required an entire essay to ‘explain’.

Conclusion

Having read the four essays twice, what you take away is that Reynolds specialised in painting portraits of famous people, this ensured the portraits were much talked about, written about and commented on by the larger-than-ever number of daily newspapers and magazines, and encouraged other famous people to commission their portraits from him, all of which boosted his professional career.

And that he was canny in using the means available to him – aristocratic patrons, choosing famous people to paint – famous soldiers, sailors, aristocrats, courtesans, writers and fellow artists – socialising and hosting grand dinners, joining top clubs, getting supporters to talk him up in the press, and encouraging the distribution of prints of his work – to build a successful and profitable career.

All of these were strategies adopted by most of his contemporaries were doing. He just did it better.

I’m confident making a statement like that because I’ve just read Ian McIntyre’s brilliant biography of Reynolds which places the great man in the incredibly busy, buzzing, competitive, dog-eat-dog environment of Georgian London, and gives extended portraits of scores and scores of his peers, rivals, colleagues and competitors.

It shows how British society changed during Reynolds’s long career, from his earliest paintings in the 1740s to his last ones in 1790. He changed, art changed, society changed.

None of the essays in this catalogue have much space to play with and so these art scholars play very fast and loose with the historical record, yanking together quotes and events which were actually far separated in time, in order to impose on the people and culture of a very different society the modish contemporary art scholar concerns of ‘gender’, ‘identity’ and ‘celebrity’.

The point being: these essays are actually quite an unreliable introduction to the life and career of Joshua Reynolds, written at the behest of a gallery with an agenda and a marketing plan. By all means buy or borrow this book for its wonderful reproductions of the paintings. But read the McIntyre biography to understand the man and his times.

Unanswered questions

Having read both MacIntyre’s book and this catalogue, I still have a couple of unanswered questions:

1. They both tell me that History Painting was meant to be the highest and most prestigious genre of the day. In which case, how come the greatest painter of the age, Reynolds, didn’t paint any history paintings, and neither did his closest rivals, Allan Ramsay or Thomas Gainsborough?

2. Why are there so many black servants in 18th century portraits?

Blog posts about the 18th century

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by Simon on July 8, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition

Posted by Simon on July 8, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/07/08/joshua-reynolds-the-creation-of-celebrity/

Aubrey Beardsley @ Tate Britain

Aubrey Beardsley must be the most distinctive British artist. If you see any of his mature works, they are immediately recognisable and almost always deeply satisfying, their elegance of line and composition emphasised by the stylish use of huge areas of unmediated black or white, and the sophistication of his sensually charged portrayal of the human figure.

The Black Cape, illustration for Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1893) Photo © Tate

This exhibition is a feast of Beardsleiana, bringing together 200 spectacular works to make the largest display of his original drawings in over 50 years and the first exhibition of his work at Tate since 1923.

The wall labels to the fifteen or so sections the exhibition is divided into are available online:

Exhibition Guide

And it contains a detailed timeline of his career. Rather than repeat all that, I’ll just single out what were, for me, the key learnings or best bits.

Key learnings

As he turned 18 and needed a job, Beardsley got a job working in an insurance office which, as you might imagine, he hated. What other early modern ‘great’ worked in an insurance office, created a distinctive body of work, and died of tuberculosis? Franz Kafka

Arts and Crafts

It is interesting to see Beardsley’s tremendous indebtedness to Arts & Crafts ideas of total design, and the importance of intertwining flower and stem motifs. And considering he was only 19!

Withered Spring by Aubrey Beardsley (1891)

Beardsley began his career just as William Morris was producing his luxury designed books from the Kelmscott Press. The curators usefully summarise the elements of a Kelmscott production as:

elaborate decorated borders
decorated initial letters
full page illustration

The hair-line style

The exhibition shows how Beardsley quickly moved from this relatively ‘heavy’ line to move to the extreme opposite, to complex compositions which are covered in a crazy network of super-fine lines. The curators call this his ‘hair line’ style.

How Arthur saw the Questing Beast by Aubrey Beardsley (1893) Victoria and Albert Museum

It is also an early example of Beardsley slipping surreptitious rudeness or irrelevancies into his pictures. At the bottom left of the ‘river bank’, right up against the frame, is the silhouette of an erect penis and scrotum. Towards the top right is a concealed treble clef.

Morte d’Arthur

The picture above is one of the Morte d’Arthur series which made Beardsley’s reputation. He was commissioned to make a hefty 353 illustrations for a new edition of the Morte by publisher J.M. Dent, including full and double-page illustrations, elaborate border designs and numerous small-scale ornamental chapter headings.

However, Beardsley quickly became bored and irked by the subject limitations and began introducing extraneous elements and flights of fancy. Thus the picture above is supposed to be of a medieval knight and a dragon though you wouldn’t really think so. Most disruptive of all is the presence of a pan or satyr from Greek mythology, absolutely nothing to do with medieval legend.

Japanese influence

The exhibition includes one print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, a lovely coloured woodblock which exemplifies the kind of Japanese influence which impacted European art from the 1870s onwards, and influenced everyone with their:

abstract depiction of pictorial space
linear intricacy
emphasis on flat pattern

Kakemono

A kakemono is a Japanese hanging scroll used to display and exhibit paintings and calligraphy inscriptions and designs mounted usually with silk fabric edges on a flexible backing, so that it can be rolled for storage. It is a distinctly different shape from traditional Western portrait shape, and Beardsley was to incorporate it into many later works.

Mantegna

Andrea Mantegna (1431 to 1506) was a key influence for Beardsley. The Italian was famous for his frescos and murals showing parades and processions and groups of people, and Beardsley used ideas and figures and compositions from Mantegna throughout his career. Even in his last accommodation, a hotel room in the south of France, he had a set of photos of works by Mantegna pinned to his wall. Indeed Beardsley produced several Mantegna-style processions, notably The Procession of Joan of Arc which was included as a foldout supplement to the second edition of The Studio magazine in 1892.

Wagnerite

Beardsley was a keen fan of Wagner, attending productions of his operas and illustrating scenes from them. He had ambitions as a writer as well as illustrator and in his last few years worked at a text which was a comic version of the legend of Tannhäuser which Wagner had made into an opera. Given the working title of the Story of Venus and Tannhäuser, excerpts were eventually published in The Savoy magazine under the title Under The Hill, an oddly Hobbit-like title for such a grand Wagnerian subject.

Photo Lineblock

Just as important for the quick evolution of Beardsley’s style was the introduction in the 1890s of the new technology of photo lineblock printing, a photomechanical process. Beardsley was disappointed at the poor reproduction of his washes and shading using this new method, but quickly adapted and made a virtue of leaving large areas of a page completely untouched, others pure black, and ensuring the lines and patterns were crisp and clear. The result is startling.

How la Beale Isoud Wrote to Sir Tristram by Aubrey Beardsley (c.1893) Alessandra and Simon Wilson

In fact this picture is singled out by the curators as exemplifying another of Beardsley’s traits which was his extraordinary ability to assimilate influences and make them his own. Thus the curators point out in this image:

Isoud resembles Jane Morris, with the classic pre-Raphaelite jutting chin and mountain of frizzy hair
the Germanic form of the desk is borrowed from Albrecht Dürer’s engraving St Jerome in his Study
the flattened use of space recalls the influence of Japanese prints
whereas the elaborate border of intertwining flower motifs recalls Arts & Crafts designs

Salomé

In 1892 Beardsley made a drawing in response to Salomé, Oscar Wilde’s play, originally written in French and based on the biblical story. Wilde admired the drawing and he and his publisher, John Lane, chose Beardsley to illustrate the English translation of the play. Beardsley produced eighteen designs in total, of which only ten appeared in the first printing of the play. Publisher John Lane suppressed or censored three of Beardsley’s illustrations for their overt sexual references, in particular when female characters’ hands are wandering towards their privates, as if about to masturbate, or unnecessary depictions of the male characters’ phalluses.

The Climax: illustration for Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1893) by Aubrey Beardsley. Photo © Tate

The Yellow Book

The exhibition clarified the timeline around the Yellow Book, and has an entire room devoted to it. Beardsley was made its art editor at its inception in 1894 and contributed the front and back covers for the first five editions. But Beardsley was closely associated with Oscar Wilde (having contributed a suite of illustrations for Wilde’s ‘immoral’ play about Salome), and so soon after Wilde’s arrest in May 1895, Beardsley was fired from the Yellow Book.

On one of the days of his trial, Wilde was seen going into court holding a copy of the Yellow Book and that clinched it for the angry mobs and journalists outside. The offices of the Yellow Book’s publishers, Bodley Head, were attacked by a mob who smashed its windows. In order tonsure the survival of the firm, and its staff, and the continuity of publication of the magazine and all his other titles, publisher John Lane had little choice but to distance himself from Beardsley. The sixth volume, of July 1895, still had the cover and several illustrations by Beardsley but he no longer worked for it. (Later it transpired that Wilde hadn’t been holding a copy of the Yellow Book at all, but a French novel, which tended to be published with yellow covers.)

The Yellow Book Volume I (1894) bound volume. Photo © Tate

It looks as if you can examine every volume of the Yellow Book, all its literary and art contents, online

The Yellow Book volume 1 April 1894

The room has an example of all five volumes of the Yellow Book that Beardsley was involved with. I’ve read about it ever since I was a teenager at school forty years ago, but I don’t think I’d ever seen a copy before and certainly not six. I’d always envisioned it as magazine-size, but it does indeed look like a hardback book, in size and shape and leather binding.

Beardsley’s work desk

The exhibition includes the very table or desk which Beardsley used during his glory years. Standing a few feet from it, it is hard to imagine that the man produced all these pitch-perfect works without the aid of architects’ tools or computers – just him, a ruler and a pen.

Beardsley’s address

With the money he made from the Salome illustrations and a small legacy Beardsley bought a house at 111 Cambridge Street, Pimlico with his mother and sister, Mabel, to both of whom he remained very close throughout his short life. Only a few hundred yards from Tate Britain where this exhibition is being held…

Oscar Wilde

Wilde was an established writer when he saw the first of Beardsley’s drawings and immediately liked them. He approved the suggestion that Beardsley illustrate the original French version of Salomé and they socialised. So far, so well known. I hadn’t realised that Beardsley satirised Wilde quite so much. There are straightforward lampoons of the increasingly fat and pompous aesthete, but he also slyly slips Wilde’s epicene features into numerous other illustrations, in one giving the moon the eyes and nose of Wilde.

The Woman in the Moon by Aubrey Beardsley (1894)

The Rape of The Lock

This is the title of Alexander Pope’s mock-heroic 18th century satire. I suppose it’s worth clarifying that ‘rape’ in the title doesn’t mean rape in our modern sense, but the older sense of ‘theft’ or stealing away. Thus Pope conceived an extended poem which uses all the devices and machinery of the classical epic to describe how one jaded aristocrat cuts a lock of hair from the head of another jaded aristocrat, and this leads to a feud between their families. Believe it or not this elaborate literary joke extends to five cantos with many extended scenes. Beardsley created nine photo-engravings for an 1896 republication of the poem, five of which are on display here for the first time.

Beardsley had been a fan of 18th century rococo prints, maybe because they – like him – are sophisticated, worldly, stylish and much more open about sexuality than the Victorians. The exhibition shows us some of the original 18th century prints which Beardsley bought at auction in Paris, and then goes on to show all the Pope pictures.

The Dream by Aubrey Beardsley (1896) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

What’s immediately obvious is the that the stark clarity of the Salome illustrations has been abandoned for a much more elaborate style, characterised above all by the stippling that creates a sort of lace doily effect on almost all the fabrics. And look at the patterning of the carpet. A long way from the stark black and white of the Salome illustrations. Many critics thought these his best works as an illustrator.

Posters

The 1890s were the glory decade for poster design in Paris, led by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and Jules Chéret. I didn’t realise Beardsley produced a number of posters which modified his own style to take on board the need for a) size b) colour.

There’s a room devoted to half a dozen of his posters, none of which match the quality of Lautre or Chéret, and most of which are advertiser’s promotions of new ranges of childrens books or books by women, alongside promotional posters for The Yellow Book and several plays and operas. The section contains the telling quote:

I have no great care for colour, but [in posters] colour is essential.

‘I have no great care for colour’. Worth pondering. And relevant to the one and only oil painting Beardsley is known to have made.

Oil painting

There’s a rare outing for Beardsley’s only oil painting and you can see why – it’s rubbish. His entire style was built around absences, around huge areas of untouched whiteness. Trying to translate that into oil, which specialises in depth and shadow, was a hopeless task.

Porn

After Beardsley was sacked from The Yellow Book, almost the only publisher who would use his drawings was Leonard Smithers. Smithers operated on the fringes of the rare book trade, issuing small, clandestine editions of risqué books with the boast: ‘I will publish the things the others are afraid to touch’. Smithers encouraged Beardsley’s already growing interest in risqué French, Latin and Greek texts and commissioned drawings to illustrate the Satires of the late Roman poet Juvenal and, most famously, Aristophanes’s bawdy satirical play Lysistrata.

In Lysistrata the women of Athens go on a sex strike, refusing to have sex with their menfolk until they stop the ridiculous war against Sparta. Beardsley made eight outrageously sexual illustrations for Smithers’ edition. Among other subjects, this is the set which includes start, beautifully made black and white line drawings of ancient Greeks with humongous erect penises. Maybe if you’re very young or innocent these are ‘shocking’ images, but to the modern viewer they are vaguely reassuring, certainly humorous. The two figures on the right are mildly realistic but it’s the guy on the left who gets the attention, not because of his phallus as such but because the entire character is obviously created for grotesque comedy.

Illustration for Lysistrata by Aubrey Beardsley (1896)

The grotesque

He knew he was attracted to ‘the grotesque’ and there is a wall label which usefully explains the origins of the grotesque in art. Grotesque originally referred to the decoration of grottos, and came to denote the depiction of deliberately hybrid and monstrous forms, which often combined body parts from different animals, like a centaur or mermaid. As the man himself said:

I see everything in a grotesque way. When I go to the theatre, for example, things shape themselves before my eyes just as I draw them. .. They all seem weird and strange to me. Things have always impressed me in this way.

Foetuses

Nobody knows to this day why he drew so many foetuses, either as insets in frames or as characters in the more grotesque illustrations. Maybe it was simply because they are a kind of quintessence of the grotesque.

My favourite

Venus framed by two statues of male gods in the form of herms (a sculpture with a head and perhaps a torso above a plain, usually squared lower section’). I like it because of its formal precision, its symmetry which is, however, broken by the asymmetric sway of Venus’s long dress. I like it because there is no indecency, boobs or penises in sight. Instead there is a sense of genuine menace from the devil eyes of the two herms. And I like it because it is a kind of reversion or revisiting of the Arts & Crafts theme of incredibly ornately interwoven bushes, stems and flowers of (I think) roses. But mostly because it is a pleasingly complete, formal, complex and rather threatening image.

Venus between Terminal Gods (1895) Drawing with india ink by Aubrey Beardsley. The Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford

Walter Sickert

Almost the best thing in the exhibition is the full-length portrait painting of Beardsley made by the English painter Walter Sickert, after they’d both attended a commemoration ceremony for John Keats. Its sketchy unfinished quality makes it a haunting gesture to the memory of the dandy and artist who died aged just 25.

Aubrey Beardsley by Walter Sickert (1894)

Crucifix

The exhibition includes the last photo of Beardsley, taken in the hotel room in the Hotel Cosmopolitain in Menton where he had gone in search of a warmer dryer climate which would be more favourable to his tuberculosis. The photo shows Beardsley looking tremendously smart in a suit and well-polished shoes opposite a wall on which are pinned reproductions of his beloved Mantegna, and a mantelpiece on which sits a crucifix.

Because although I’ve probably read it numerous times, I’d forgotten that in his last months Beardsley converted to Catholicism. He died holding a crucifix. Just a few days before he died he wrote a letter to Leonard Smithers asking him to destroy all of Beardsley’s risqué images, the Lysistrata illustrations etc. Smithers refused and so they were saved for generations of schoolboys to giggle over.

Who does a deathbed request to destroy his works which its address completely ignored remind you of? Franz Kafka.

Film

There is a room with benches so you can watch Charles Bryant and Alla Nazimova’s 1923 silent movie version of Salomé immediately following the room of Beardsley’s illustrations. For some reason the gallery lights had been left on full power in this room which made it harder to see the image on the screen.

Legacy

The exhibition closes with a sketchy overview of Beardsley’s legacy from his influence on the long sinuous lines of Art Nouveau via a string of now mostly forgotten book illustrators who copied his style (Harry Clarke, Hans Henning Voigt) through the revival of Beardley’s reputation and style which was sparked by a major retrospective of his work at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1966 which led to the incorporation of Beardsleyesque black and white swirling lines into lots of psychedelic posters and, most famously of all, into the portrait of the four Beatles in the cover art for their LP Revolver.

Portrait of Aubrey Beardsley 1893 by Frederick Evans. Wilson Centre for Photography

This is a long, very thorough, exhaustive and informative exhibition about a truly world class and utterly distinctive English artist.

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by Simon on March 16, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Sex

Tagged Alexander Pope, Ali Baba, Alla Nazimova, Andrea Mantegna, Aristophanes, Art Nouveau, Arts & crafts, Aubrey Beardsley, Catholicism, Charles Bryant, fin-de-siecle, foetus, Franz Kafka, Frederick Evans, grotesque, hair line manner, Hans Henning Voigt, Harry Clarke, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, illustrations, J.M. Dent, Japonisme, John Lane, Jules Chéret, Juvenal, kakemono, Leonard Smithers, Lysistrata, Mabel Beardsley, Morte d'Arthur, oil painting, Oscar Wilde's, phallus, photo lineblock printing, poem, pornography, posters, print, Revolver, Rococo, Roman Catholicism, Salome, satire, sex, stippling, Tannhäuser, Tate Britain, the beatles, the Decadence, the Kelmscott Press, The Rape of The Lock, The Studio, The Yellow Book, Under The Hill, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Venus between Terminal Gods, Victoria and Albert Museum, Victorian, Wagne, Wagnerite, Walter Sickert

Posted by Simon on March 16, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/03/16/aubrey-beardsley-tate-britain/

Content warnings at Tate

Warning: This blog post contains strong and sometimes challenging imagery, including depictions of slavery, violence and suffering.

Baroque Britain

When I visited the Baroque Britain exhibition at Tate Britain I was surprised that there was a Content Warning at the entrance to the second room. This warned us that some of the images were disturbing and might upset visitors. Specifically, a massive painting by Benedetto Gennari the Younger which shows black people in collars and chains. Slaves, in other words.

Portrait of Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin by Benedetto Gennari the Younger (1674)

A handful of other paintings show rich people – men and women – being served or accompanied by black servants, but this is the only one where the black people (all boys, I think) are wearing very obvious metal slave collars round their throats.

William Blake

This is the second warning notice I’m aware of Tate putting up. The William Blake exhibition last year also warned visitors, in these words:

The art of William Blake contains strong and sometimes challenging imagery, including some depictions of violence and suffering.

That’s putting it mildly, seeing as Blake illustrated Dante’s Divine Comedy with its extensive descriptions of thousands of sinners being subjected to all sorts of tortures and torments in Hell, and Milton’s Paradise Lost which opens with Satan and the fallen angels languishing in agony in a lake of fire. Presumably it was these images of fire and brimstone which the warning was talking about.

Satan, Sin and Death: Satan Comes to the Gates of Hell by William Blake (1807)

Although when you actually look at Blake’s images, they are pretty inoffensive, aren’t they? Is an image like the above really thought to be so scary that visitors to an art gallery need a warning about it?

I wonder if the curators have ever seen a Hollywood film? Or even an average episode of Eastenders? Chock full of threat and violence. I can think of plenty of other Tate exhibitions which were full of much more genuinely upsetting images.

Notes and queries

Maybe visitors do need to be warned that art galleries and exhibitions contain images of slavery or violence or threat, but this new trend obviously raises a few questions:

Slavery 1 – black slavery

There must be thousands of images of black slavery scattered around the art world. Will every single one of them eventually require a Warning? For example, the huge memorial sculpture to slavery by Kara Walker currently on display in the atrium of Tate Modern. I don’t recall there being a warning for visitors about to encounter this. Should there be one?

Much more appalling and upsetting than any painting is actual period photographs of black slaves, which survive by the tens of thousands. I suppose if there’s an exhibition about slavery, or about these kinds of photographs it will be self-evident but, presumably if they’re included in exhibitions focused on other subjects – like the American Civil War or American history – presumably any photos of slavery will require a warning, as well.

Slavery 2 – white slavery

Most pre-modern societies had some form of slavery: ancient Rome and ancient Greece were based on slavery, and the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings traded in slaves (it’s estimated that at the time of the Norman Conquest of 1066, 1 in 10 of the British population were slaves).

The Mayans and Aztecs kept slaves in the Americas, as did the Sumerians and Babylonians in the Near East. The Egyptians employed huge numbers of slaves, including Israelites, Europeans and Ethiopians. Slave armies were kept by the Ottomans and Egyptians.

In Imperial Russia, in the first half of the 19th century, one third of the population were serfs who, like the slaves in the Americas, had the status of chattels and could be bought and sold.

In fact the English word ‘slave’ is derived from Slav, the white ethnic underclass of Eastern Europe that provided the bulk of medieval-and-later slaves, not only to Europe but to the Turks, Arabs and Tatars.

SLAVE – late 13the century, ‘person who is the chattel or property of another’, from the Old French esclave (13c.), from Medieval Latin Sclavus ‘slave’ (source also of Italian schiavo, French esclave, Spanish esclavo), originally ‘Slav’; used in this secondary sense because of the many Slavs sold into slavery by conquering peoples. (Etymological dictionary)

Will any gallery displaying any images of slaves from any of these historical cultures, from any period of history, from anywhere around the world, require there to be warning messages for visitors?

‘Trade negotiations in the country of Eastern Slavs by Sergei Vasilyevich Ivanov (1909)

If not, why not?

Violence 1 – secular

Human history is more or less the ceaseless history of wars and empires, human history is saturated with conflict and violence. Will notices warning of ‘strong and sometimes challenging imagery, including some depictions of violence and suffering’ have to be placed outside every gallery which includes any images of conflict and war?

The first VC of the Great War won by Capt Francis Grenfell of the 9th Lancers at Audregnies, Belgium on 24th August, 1914 by Richard Caton Woodville

Violence 2 – religious

Christianity is saturated with violence. Its central image is of a man being tortured to death, and is closely accompanied by the stories and images of countless thousands of other Christian martyrs, most of whom died blood-curdling deaths.

Will all of these images require a warning notice? They would have to be put up in every gallery which includes images of the Passion of Christ or of the saints and, if we follow this logic through, outside every Roman Catholic church in the world.

Crucifix at the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Hanceville, Alabama, USA

Why now?

Why now? The painting by Benedetto Gennari the Younger has existed for 340 years and been sporadically on public display throughout that period, the Blake images for over 200 years during which they have featured in numerous books and exhibitions.

Why are these warning notices making their appearance now?

It’s not as if we are suddenly more opposed to slavery – the Campaign to Abolish the Slave Trade got going during the 1780s, 240 years ago, and used as many images of atrocities against slaves as it could find. Anti-Slavery International, the world’s oldest international human rights organisation, was founded in London in 1839 and is still very active. I.e. graphic images of slavery have been in the public domain for over 200 years.

As to images of threat or violence, my God what have most movies for the past 100 years been about, plenty of plays and countless hundreds of thousands of art works not to mention millions of photographs taken of every war since the Crimea or the Indian Mutiny.

What is it in contemporary society which suggests that art lovers, old and young, native and foreign, have, for the last 300 years or so, been able to confront and process images like this without any kind of warning… but now they can’t.

Re. the slavery images, is it because the black population of the UK has reached a kind of tipping point where images like this are no longer acceptable, even in an obviously academic and historical context?

Have changes in social attitudes across the British population suddenly made images of black people in chains unacceptable?

But what about the warning about Blake’s pretty harmless cartoons? That doesn’t make any sense at all.

Or is it not British society, is it the attitudes of art curators which have changed?

Is it not the British public that the curators are concerned about? Is it the art curating profession which has been swept by progressive views, and whose modern woke training has told them that images like this are objectionable.

When they envision visitors being offended, is it really themselves and their progressive cohorts who they are envisioning?

Conclusion

So I’m not belittling the impact that images of black slavery might well have on black, or any other, visitors to an exhibition like this, or the emotional impact of images of threat or violence might have on gallery goers more broadly.

But up until a year or so ago, curators of pretty much every gallery and museum in the world were happy to assume that gallery visitors were grown-up enough, adult enough, to take images like this in their stride. To be shocked, maybe, maybe even to have an emotional response, but to be able to cope with it.

I’m genuinely curious to know 1. what has changed and 2. where this new trend will go.

And 3. am I going to have to put warnings at the top of every one of my blog posts which is about war or slavery or violence or conflict or threat? Because that’s most of them…

Reviews of other Tate exhibitions

British Baroque: Power and Illusion (February 2020)
Dora Maar @ Tate Modern (December 2019)
John Opie @ Tate Britain (November 2019)
Mark Leckey @ Tate Britain (November 2019)
Nam June Paik @ Tate Modern (November 2019)
Kara Walker @ Tate Modern (November 2019)
William Blake @ Tate Britain (October 2019)
Natalia Goncharova (August 2019)
Art Now: France-Lise McGurn: Sleepless (July 2019)
Mike Nelson: The Asset Strippers (July 2019)
Frank Bowling (July 2019)
Franz West @ Tate Modern (May 2019)
Van Gogh and Britain @ Tate Britain (May 2019)
Magic Realism: Art in Weimar Germany 1919 – 1933 @ Tate Modern (April 2019)
Dorothea Tanning @ Tate Modern (March 2019)
Don McCullin @ Tate Britain (February 2019)
Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory @ Tate Modern (February 2019)
Christmas slugs @ Tate Britain (December 2018)
Turner Prize 2018 @ Tate Britain (December 2018)
Anni Albers @ Tate Modern (December 2018)
Edward Burne-Jones @ Tate Britain (October 2018)
Aftermath: Art in the wake of World War One @ Tate Britain (September 2018)
All Too Human @ Tate Britain (March 2018)
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Not Everyone Will be Taken Into the Future (January 2018)
Red Star over Russia (December 2017)
Impressionists in London @ Tate Britain (November 2017)
Giacometti @ Tate Modern (September 2017)
Soul Of A Nation: Art In The Age Of Black Power @ Tate Modern (July 2017)
Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 @ Tate Modern (June 2017)
Queer British Art 1861-1967 @ Tate Britain (April 2017)
The Radical Eye @ Tate Modern (March 2017)
David Hockney @ Tate Britain (February 2017)
Robert Rauschenberg @ Tate Modern (February 2017)
Paul Nash @ Tate Britain (December 2016)
Painting with Light @ Tate Britain (August 2016)
Georgia O’Keefke @ Tate Modern (July 2016)
Performing for the camera @ Tate Modern (March 2016)
Frank Auerbach @ Tate Britain (February 2016)
Every Room in Tate Modern (January 2016)
Every room in Tate Britain (part one) (January 2016)
Every room in Tate Britain (part two) (January 2016)
Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past @ Tate Britain (January 2016)
Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture @ Tate Modern (December 2015)
The EY Exhibition: The World Goes Pop @ Tate Modern (November 2015)
Agnes Martin @ Tate Modern (September 2015)
Fighting History @ Tate Britain (August 2015)
Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World @ Tate Britain (August 2015)
Sonia Delaunay @ Tate Modern (May 2015)
Salt and Silver @ Tate Britain (April 2015)
Sculpture Victorious @ Tate Britain (April 2015)
Conflict, Time, Photography @ Tate Modern (March 2015)
Late Turner @ Tate Britain (January 2015)
Malevich: Revolutionary of Russian art @ Tate Modern (August 2014)
British Folk Art @ Tate Britain (June 2014)
Ruin Lust @ Tate Britain (March 2014)
Richard Deacon @ Tate Britain (February 2014)
Paul Klee – Making Visible @ Tate Modern (January 2014)
Art under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm @ Tate Britain (December 2013)
Lowry and the painting of modern life @ Tate Britain (September 2013)
Lichtenstein: A Restrospective @ Tate Modern (March 2013)
Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian avant-garde @ Tate Britain (September 2012)
Damien Hirst @ Tate Modern (September 2012)
Picasso and Modern British Art @ Tate Britain (July 2012)
John Martin @ Tate Britain (December 2011)

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by Simon on March 3, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Art

Posted by Simon on March 3, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/03/03/content-warnings-at-tate/

John Opie @ Tate Britain

Tate Britain is labyrinthine enough to have half a dozen side rooms and spaces where it mounts small (and sometimes not so small) ‘spotlight’ exhibitions, focusing on a particular topic or artist.

In a modest room off the main atrium, little more than a glorified corridor, Tate Britain is hosting a small but beautifully formed exhibition about the painting and cultural environment of the late-eighteenth century English painter, John Opie (1761 to 1807).

The Cornish Wonder

Opie’s success is surprising because of his background. In the late eighteenth century artists generally came from artistic families, or from educated, middle-class homes where their interest in such a risky career could be indulged.

In contrast, Opie was born at St Agnes, near Truro in Cornwall, the son of a mine carpenter. Although he did attend school, he was probably largely self-educated. A wealthy local couple later reported that he visited the library in their house and ‘read every book in it’. But Opie’s father opposed his intellectual and artistic interests, and trained him as a carpenter.

Opie’s life was transformed when he encountered the poet and art critic, Dr John Wolcot, who brought Opie to London and launched him on his career. Wolcot became the painter’s manager, taking a cut of his earnings and helped him gain fame as a sort of self-taught genius. Opie’s dramatic style and mastery of light and shade that prompted comparisons with the most admired Old Masters such as Rembrandt and Caravaggio, and earned him the reputation of ‘the Cornish wonder’.

Portrait of the Artist by John Opie (c.1790)

The common people

When Opie first came to London, much was made of his humble origins. The Peasant’s Family is a good example of his dignified images of ordinary people. One critic wrote:

Could people in vulgar life [the working-class] afford to pay for pictures, Opie would be their man.

Little is known of the early history of this painting. There is no documentation to prove without doubt that Opie painted it, but it has always been accepted as by him.

The Peasant’s Family by John Opie (c.1783 to 1785)

Portraits

Opie produced portraits and subject paintings of striking originality and realism. Although little-known today, his work created a sensation in exhibitions during his lifetime. Opie was working at a time when fame was becoming an increasingly important part of artistic success. Artists jostled to grab public attention, painting more flamboyant and dramatic pictures.

We do not know the identity of the woman in this painting who is depicted as the heroine of Shakespeare’s tragedy Troilus and Cressida, but she is probably a celebrity or actress who contemporary viewers would have recognised.

Portrait of a Lady in the Character of Cressida by John Opie (1800)

Radicals

Mary Wollstonecraft was a ground-breaking feminist. This portrait shows her looking directly towards us, temporarily distracted from her studies. Such a pose would more typically be used for a male sitter. Women would normally be presented as more passive, often gazing away from the viewer like Cressida above.

The painting dates to around the time she published A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). This argued against the idea that women were naturally inferior to men and emphasised the importance of education.

Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie ( c.1791)

The intellectual milieu

In fact Opie was part of the leading radical circles of the day. After the French Revolution broke out in 1789 and then Britain went to war with revolutionary France in 1793, radical beliefs of any sort became dangerous, but Opie was part of a liberal metropolitan circle which included Wollstonecraft, her philosopher husband William Godwin and the ‘sensation’ painter Henry Fuseli.

Aside from the portraits, one of the most interesting exhibits here is an elaborate anti-radical cartoon by the famous Georgian caricaturist James Gillray. It depicts sequences from a long anti-revolutionary poem by George Canning.

The caricature warns of post-apocalyptic world where evil has triumphed, where the president of the French Directory (Revelliere-Lepeaux) is being installed at St Paul’s Cathedral as the head of a new religion named ‘theophilanthropy’, and where the Leviathan arrives accompanied (and ridden) by an extensive retinue of triumphant British followers waving their revolutionary bonnets rouges.

NEW MORALITY, or, The promis’d Installment of the High Priest of the THEOPHILANTHROPES, with the Homage of Leviathan and his Suite by James Gillray (1798)

As intended, it’s fun reading the elaborate caption under the cartoon and trying to identify the contemporary political and intellectual figures who are being so thoroughly lampooned. And the wall label tells us that Opie in fact painted many of these ridiculed radicals – including Charles James Fox, John Nichols, Lord Moira and Samuel Whitbread, the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Stanhope, the scientist Joseph Priestley and the radical John Horne Tooke.

The ‘cornucopia of ignorance’ which the acolytes are emptying before the altar contains works by Mary Wollstonecroft, the playwright Thomas Holcroft, and the novelist Charlotte Smith, all of whom had sat for Opie.

Amelia Opie

And he married someone from this progressive world – the liberal novelist and poet Amelia Alderson.

Amelia Opie by John Opie (1798)

Amelia was the daughter of a successful physician. She was already gaining notice as a writer with strong liberal and radical sympathies when she met John around 1796. He probably painted this wonderfully feeling portrait in 1798, the year of their marriage. As Amelia Opie she went on to achieve success as a novelist, poet and political activist, especially against the slave trade.

Early death

Despite his unconventional manners and his resolutely working class origins (his father in law was revolted by his table manners; even his wife admitted his studio was like a ‘pigsty’), John carved a career for himself in London’s fast-moving and competitive art market. He had just been made Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy when he died suddenly, at the early age of 45. For the rest of her life, Amelia did much to promote his memory and achievement.

Thoughts

This is a charming, funny and interesting little display. There must be hundreds of similarly obscure and forgotten British painters who would benefit from the same care and attention.

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by Simon on November 25, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, History, Painting

Posted by Simon on November 25, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/11/25/john-opie-tate-britain/

The Bauhaus and Britain @ Tate Britain

This one-room FREE display at Tate Britain celebrated the centenary of the opening of the Bauhaus School of Art and Design in Germany in 1919 with a display showing the interaction between Bauhaus ideas and exponents, and their followers and collaborators in Britain.

The Bauhaus aimed to promote modern art for a modern world and to demonstrate the practical use of all the arts to improve society. As part of this goal it set out to integrate disciplines including the fine arts, architecture, craft, graphic design and photography.

During its 14 year existence an astonishing array of some of the most creative 20th century artists, sculptors, designers, architects and photographers lived and taught and made wonderful things at the school’s Weimar campus.

K VII (1922) by László Moholy-Nagy. Tate

As soon as they came to power in 1933 the Nazis, who not incorrectly saw the Bauhaus as a hotbed of radicalism, shut it down. Many artists associated with the school came to Britain in search of safety and work and British artists with similar interests to those of the Bauhaus welcomed their émigré colleagues. Many key Bauhaus figures went on to the United States, opening the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937, but some remained in Britain, and this exhibition focuses on a) those who stayed b) the British periods of those who stayed for a year or two before moving on.

Ball, Plane and Hole (1936) by Dame Barbara Hepworth

So it is that the exhibition interleaved works produced by both Bauhaus and British artists and designers across a characteristically wide range of media. I counted:

Paintings by Ben Nicholson, László Moholy-Nagy, John Stephenson, Alastair Morton artistic director of Edinburgh Weavers who commissioned work from Nicholson.

Watercolours by Grete Marks.

Sculptures by Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo, who settled permanently in London and became a leading figure in the development of abstract art in Britain.

Atea service by Grete Marks and a teapot by Naum Slutzky.

Ceramics such as the vase by Grete Marks.

Carpets by Ben Nicholson.

Fabrics by Ben Nicholson.

Furniture i.e. streamlined modern chairs by Marcel Breuer.

A bakelite radio set designed by Wells Coates.

Photos of modernist blocks of flats (Kensal House, Kensal Rise) by Edith Tudor-Hart, and portraits by Lucia Moholy-Nagy.

Architecture Kensal House designed by Elizabeth Denby with architect Maxwell Fry, who had been English partner to Bauhaus director Walter Gropius during his sojourn in England 1934 to 1937.

A selection of jewellery, namely brooches, necklaces and rings – by goldsmith, industrial designer and master craftsman Naum Slutzky.

Dove brooch by Naum Slutzky

And books. There are several display cases showing old magazines from the 1930s by such earnest advocates of modernism as Sir Herbert Read, the dustjacket of whose 1934 book Art and Industry was designed by Bauhaus-trained Herbert Bayer. Read went on to try and create an inter-disciplinary art & design college in Edinburgh.

There’s a rare copy of The New Architecture and The Bauhaus by the Bauhaus’s founding director, Walter Gropius, published in 1937, one of the first books about the school in English. And of the 1939 Pelican Special A Hundred Years of Photography by Lucia Moholy-Nagy, László’s photographer wife.

Another display case shows magazine articles written by some of these artists, alongside personal photos of, for example, the Nicholsons at home, and postcards from Moholy-Nagy to the Nicholsons.

Ben Nicholson always features prominently in these exhibitions as one of the 1930s British artists who experimented most extensively with abstract and geometric shapes, in both painting and small sculptures and (as here) a carpet and fabrics.

I don’t quite know why, but he’s never lit my candle at all – I’ve always thought of him as a poor British cousin of the far more exciting and innovative Europeans. Here’s a typical piece of Nicholsonia. Its heart’s in the right place but… for some reason it leaves me cold…

Sculpture (c.1936) by Ben Nicholson. Tate

Nicholson lived in North London with his partner Barbara Hepworth (whose work I’ve always found much more interesting). They befriended their art historian neighbour Read among other arty types, and a number of the Bauhaus exiles settled in North London near them, forming quite an artistic colony, including exiles like Bauhaus-trained Marcel Breuer who designed book covers, tables and chairs, some of which are in the exhibition.

B9 table by Marcel Breuer (1927)

The exhibition even includes an entertaining film – Lobsters! It was co-directed by Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy, who was commissioned to work on the film with English director John Mathias. While in Britain Moholy-Nagy took on short-term roles in photography, film and commercial design. He designed ads for London Transport and collaborated on this short film depicting fishermen on the Sussex coast. The surprising angles and close-ups are attributed to Moholy-Nagy’s Bauhaus sensibility but I personally was more struck by the plummy tones of the commentary and the jolly score by Arthur Benjamin.

Watch Lobsters! on the British Film Institute website

After a while I noticed that almost all the objects on display are owned by Tate, and it occurred to the cynic in me that the Bauhaus centenary was probably an opportunity for the gallery to dust off some of these rather dowdy antiques and given them an airing.

I’m not criticising. The insight just helped to explain why most of the exhibits were only so-so, or included sort-of interesting postcards and magazines, but lacked any real killer exhibits.

That said, not choosing to go to town on the centenary but limiting the celebration to a modest and FREE display made it in some ways feel much more relaxed and casual and accessible than it might have been.

Other Weimar Germany-related reviews

Art and culture

History

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by Simon on November 22, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Germany

Posted by Simon on November 22, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/11/22/the-bauhaus-and-britain-tate-britain/

Year 3 by Steve McQueen @ Tate Britain

Steve McQueen

The black British artist and film director Steven Rodney McQueen CBE was born 1969 and is probably best known for writing and directing the big budget movie 12 Years a Slave, an adaptation of an 1853 slave narrative memoir for which he won an Oscar.

McQueen won the Turner Prize back in 1999. In 2006, he went to Iraq as an official war artist and the following year presented Queen and Country, a piece that commemorated the deaths of British soldiers who died in the Iraq War by presenting their portraits as sheets of stamps.

So he’s had quite a long, varied and successful career.

Year 3

Now a new exhibition has opened in the big long central atrium of Tate Britain titled Year 3. To art fans bewildered by years of conceptual, or politically correct, or otherwise demanding ‘art’, the idea is disarmingly simple.

McQueen invited every Year 3 pupil in London to have their photograph taken by a team of specially trained Tate photographers. They included children from state primaries, independent schools, faith schools, special schools, pupil referral units and home-educated pupils.

These class photos are brought together into a single large-scale installation, capturing tens of thousands of Year 3 pupils in a milestone year in their development.

All the photo were shot in the same identical style. The teachers were all told to assemble their pupils in the same kind of official photo layout, very prim and formal, with teacher embedded in the middle. The pupils are wearing school uniforms.

The resulting prints are a uniform shape (landscape) and size. And they are hung in rigidly geometric grids, twelve photos high and fifteen wide in such a way as to completely wallpaper the entire Tate atrium.

There are no fewer than 3,000 class photographs depicting 76,000 children, although this represents only two-thirds of London’s year 3 pupils.

There are no name plaques or notes of any kind identifying any of the children or schools. Instead (as one of the Tate ‘visitor assistants’ pointed out to me), right down on the stone skirting board beneath each grid there’s a small number (we were standing next to grid 23 when she explained this). She told me that each school will have been told which grid their school photo is in, and then its grid reference (e.g. grid 23, row 4, 7 from the left).

This, of course, makes a fairly good game: bring your children along your kids who had their photo taken and see if they can find the photo. And so by 11am, as I emerged dazed from the Mark Leckey installation, I found the atrium absolutely packed with parents, buggies and small kids racing round. It was a lovely atmosphere. It’s a great idea. I’m not sure where you go with it, though, after you’ve found your school photo and looked at half a dozen, or a dozen others, or a dozen more…

What is year 3?

I had to google to find out what year 3 actually means:

In schools in England Year 3 is the third year after Reception. It is the third full year of compulsory education, with children being admitted who are aged 7 before 1 September in any given academic year. It is also the first year of Key Stage 2 in which the National Curriculum is taught.

Year 3 kids. They’re small. They’re cute. Looking at the backdrops is mildly interesting, or assessing the schoolteacher included in the photo: over 80% of infant and junior school teachers are female and the photos reflect that. At that age your teacher is the world and the photos made me strain back through the mists of time to remember my year three teacher. Memories.

Since we know that a good deal of a child’s future life chances are established by the age of five, it’s also interesting to compare and contrast the atmosphere, the vibe and appearance of the various groups. I couldn’t help be impressed by the spiffily smart uniforms of some of the schools, and compare them with the rough and ready sweatshirts of other classes.

Who knows if these are decisive social and educational factors – I don’t. I’m just pointing out that this was one of the obvious visual elements which your eye is drawn to compare and contrast.

Maybe I’m not getting the sense of optimism and hope the photos are obviously meant to generate. The Artangel website explains that:

Year 3 is considered a milestone year in a child’s development and sense of identity. It’s when children aged 7–8 years old become more conscious of a much bigger world beyond their immediate family. This portrait of London captures that moment of excitement, anticipation and hope. It’s a celebration of the young people who will make London their own, and a meditation on the personal circumstances and social forces that shape all our lives.

Maybe this resonates with many of the young families with small children running all round the Tate atrium who I saw enjoying the exhibition.

Visiting Tate

And there is also an art educational element for the children themselves.

Over the months ahead, pupils featured in the exhibition will be visiting Tate Britain with their schools. As part of this learning experience, pupils will see their photograph up close in dedicated learning spaces around the gallery and take part in activities that explore the exhibition themes.

Sounds like a worthy idea: introducing fairly small children to the world of art and imaginative opportunity. Who could quibble?

Billboards

Running in parallel to the exhibition at Tate Britain, Artangel is staging an outdoor exhibition of the photos i.e. hanging them on no fewer than 600 billboards across all of 33 London boroughs in a rather forlorn attempt to brighten up our shitty city.

Steve McQueen Year 3 billboard at Camden Road, London Borough of Camden. Photo by Theo Christelis

And:

At the end of the exhibition each picture will be returned to the school where the photograph was taken.

Sweet.

The video

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by Simon on November 20, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Photography

Posted by Simon on November 20, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/11/20/year-3-steve-mcqueen-tate-britain/

Mark Leckey: O’ Magic Power of Bleakness @ Tate Britain

This is an absolutely brilliant, transformative piece of work, hugely staged and thrillingly experienced. It consists of a massive installation and three videos by contemporary artist Mark Leckey. Here’s the promotional video to gt a quick feel:

The big exhibition space on the east side of Tate’s central atrium has had all its partitions removed to create one enormous gallery space. In this space they have recreated a lift-size model of an enormous concrete motorway bridge. To be precise, a recreation of a section of the M53 flyover close to Leckey’s childhood home on the Wirral where he used to play with his boyhood friends.

The bridge goes over our heads at a diagonal, supported by enormous concrete piers. Off to the left is the concrete slope between the hard shoulder which ramps up to the underside of the bridge. It is an enormous brooding presence and absolutely brilliant, cavernous and terrifying.

The first motorway was opened in 1958 and these huge concrete monsters have been part of the British landscape for over 60 years. Why is so little written or painted or arted about them, and about the poisonous mega-roads and planet-strangling super-traffic they carry.

The room is almost pitch black. I nearly bumped into one of the enormous fake concrete motorway piers. But just about made them out because they – and the handful of concrete ‘benches’ scattered about are illuminated by the flashing, fleering images from two enormous video screens on the far wall, and from a suite of six or so smaller screens off to the right.

Onto these are projected three art videos or films:

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999)
Dream English Kid, 1964 – 1999 AD (2015)
Under Under In (2019)

I used to work in TV. In the late 1980s I produced and directed a dozen or so videos for commercial clients, before going on to produce live and prerecorded programmes for Channel 4, ITV and BBC1 So I’ve spent a lot of time in edit suites, with editors and directors, editing, discussing, cutting and mixing material. This means I have quite high standards and so find a lot of experimental art videos unwatchably amateurish.

To my own surprise, however, I ended up staying to watch all three videos in their entirety and being riveted, transfixed, transported. Yes yes yes, I wanted to shout, this is actual modern life in its shittyness, in its squalor, with working class lads making the most of the appalling built environments, the failing schools, the windswept concrete shopping centres and the high-rise slums designed for them by avant-garde architects and progressive town planners, by getting off their faces on booze and pills and dancing themselves stupid on the dance floors of thousands of provincial dance halls and clubs.

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore is a compilation of found footage from dance floors chronicling Britain’s underground club scene from the 1970s to the 1990s, from the era of mullets and Northern Soul through to the ecstasy-fuelled raves of the 1990s.

God it takes me back to having that kind of haircut in the 1970s and crappy church halls discos where lads in Doc Martens ended up fighting each other, through the pogoing and gobbing of the punk era, with the straights going to crappy mirror-ball discos, and then on into the suddenly hard core, techno, trance and rave scene of the late 80s which burst out of nowhere with its amazing sound systems, lasers and powerful psychotropic drugs.

So much for the social history, but what makes Leckey’s films a cut above others in the same style is the use of sound. He has a phenomenal grasp of the importance of sound, sound effects and sound editing. Having sat in those darkened edit suites for years and years and years I can vouch for the drastic affect sound editing and mixing has on the pictures in TV or film. Take a sequence of a beautiful girl smiling: then superimpose on it the sounds of – someone having an orgasm, a woman screaming, or a little girl saying a nursery rhyme. Identical image, radically different impacts.

The picture cutting is brilliant and worth commenting on in its own right; but what lifts Leckey’s films into brilliant is the extremely sophisticated and creative use of sound effects; mashups of music, deep ominous booms, clips of speech, electronic or industrial sounds.

So it’s the sound effects which, in my opinion, make these more than films, but into a fully immersive experience. The space under the mocked-up motorway is pitch black, cavernous and echoing. That’s why it’s worth traveling to Tate Britain to have the full huge, disorientating, slightly scary and sense-bombardment experience. Watching it on a computer or phone screen is too small and contained. You need to be overwhelmed by it. Possessed.

Dream English Kid, 1964 to 1999 AD

In 1979, Leckey went to Eric’s, the Liverpool nightclub, to see a gig by Joy Division. Recently, the artist located amateur footage of the event on YouTube. He realised that many, maybe most, of what we think of as treasured personal memories can now be found online, and that was the inspiration to assemble a film.

So Dream English Kid 1964 – 1999 AD uses archival material from television shows, advertisements and music, to recreate a record of all the significant events in his life from the 1970s until the 1990s.

God, it’s wonderful a) as straightforward nostalgia – I didn’t grow up in Liverpool or a slum, but I remember the look and feel of shitty England in the 1970s, and the sequence which shows all the horrible packed food – Nesquik, Marmite, Smash, Kelloggs Frosties – brought back the look and taste of all the crap our parents stuffed us with;

b) again because of the sophistication of the picture editing, but more than that, of the sound: it creates a really haunting beguiling, shocking, in your face soundscape, alternating soft silent moments, with raucous live gig sound, urchins in the street, lads, and other much more haunting, weird and unsettling sound effects. It is as if History itself is struggling to break through the bounds of petty human existence. As if some deeper force is struggling to break free from our everyday concerns about haircuts and boyfriends and pop songs, and tell us the big all-important thing, which we’re all too busy to listen to.

Under Under In (2019)

The last of the three film is Under Under In 2019 is noticeably different in feel. It’s because the other two are mostly made up of old film and video footage cannily edited together, while this one is all contemporary, shot on digital camera.

It is all shot under the actual motorway bridge whose model we are standing under and it features half a dozen or so young gang members, dressed in up-to-the-minute street fashion (I assume) – Adidas hoodies zipped up over their faces, trainers, rap hand gestures. For the first ten minutes or so they’re just hanging under the bridge, pushing each other, giggling, and what looks like getting high by car oil products (I think).

But as I’ve highlighted above, the real impact derives not from the visuals – but from the amazing soundscape Leckey has crafted, in which whatever conversation the lads are having is cut and fragmented and distorted and mangled into spare phonemes and loose grunts and blips and frags of speech, echoing, dismantled, lost under the roaring motorway bridge.

Apparently the film in some way addresses a supernatural encounter Leckey believes he had under the bridge as a child.

Many of my works have their wellspring in things and experiences from my childhood and youth that still haunt me.

What this means is that one of the larking-about kids seems to see something, a creature tucked in the angle of the bridge, hands reach out, small hands, large hand, white images, intercut sound track, it’s impossible to make out what’s happening but a little kid’s voice repeats, ‘Where you been?’ in a strong Scouse accent.

I’ve made it sound much more comprehensible than it is, the images are quickly intercut, treated, amplified distorted shown from above, the camera swoops down, the same gestures are repeated in juddering cuts or vanish.

It’s all shown on the six smaller screens I mentioned above. You have to stand throughout the entire screening but after a while I realised that behind us, up in the cramped space where the ramp meets the bridge of the model, was another screen onto which were projected images of the pumped-up lads crouching in a row, pushing each other joshing and interacting, which complemented the main action on the six screens. Which cut out at some moments, leaving us in puzzling darkness. Haunting & spooky.

Suddenly something more or less understandable emerges out of the blizzard of fragments and rave-era jump cuts. This is a completely computer-generated diagram of the flyover bridge, and then the point of view descends, under road level to reveal… another view o the same thing, an older type of wooden bridge… and keeps on going down to reveal an older structure yet over the same ravine… and down again and again until we come to a layer of standing stones, dolmen like Stonehenge is built from, and the camera stops descending but moves forward, between the stones, into some dark ominous mysterious chamber.

Leckey has written and spoken about his interest in older visions of Albion, in older imagery connected with faeries and magic inhabiting the countryside, and this sequence obviously comes out of that interest. But it’s one thing to say something, and quite another to come up with a visual and audio presentation of it which is so huge and overwhelming that it makes the viewers’ hair stand up on end.

The film below doesn’t feature in the installation, but it gives you a good sense of the mashup of ancient magic, incantation, a visionary way of reconceiving the shitty, concrete slabverse of our poisonous, toxic streets and motorways and flyover cities, choked with fumes, killing us all, and the aggressively visionary cutups of imagery from all available sources which Leckey uses. And the weird spellbinding obsession with the motorway flyover as a metaphor for our entire ruinous civilisation, which I found preposterous, ungainly, and yet weirdly compelling

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by Simon on November 19, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition

Posted by Simon on November 19, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/11/19/mark-leckey-o-magic-power-of-bleakness-tate-britain/

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All posts tagged Tate Britain

Room one

Artists and works

Yhonnie Scarce

Three videos

1. Vernon Ah Kee

2. Bonita Ely

3. Peter Kennedy and John Hughes

Tracey Moffat

Video

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Introduction

Exhibition guide

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Wars in Africa

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The wonderful wall labels

Types of work

Introductory

Small

‘The Negative of Words’ (1996)

‘Luck Runs out’ (1995)

‘Embryo Firearms’ (1995)

‘Embryo money’ (1996)

‘Exhaled cocaine’ (1996)

Inhaled cliffs’ (1996)

Medium

Large

Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991)

Perpetual canon (2004)

Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988 to 1989)

Newer works

‘War Room’ (2015)

‘Magna Carta (An Embroidery)’ (2015)

The videos

Politics

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The concept of celebrity

Being modish risks becoming dated

The authors’ definitions of celebrity

Robert Orme’s 15 minutes of fame

What was new about 18th century ‘media’

Reynolds’s strategies for success

But was Reynolds unique?

Art scholarship prose style

1. Buzzwords

2. Starchy prose style

3. Thin content

Conclusion

Unanswered questions

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Key learnings

Arts and Crafts

The hair-line style

Morte d’Arthur

Japanese influence

Kakemono

Mantegna

Wagnerite

Photo Lineblock

Salomé

The Yellow Book

Beardsley’s work desk

Beardsley’s address

Oscar Wilde

The Rape of The Lock

Posters

Oil painting