Tag: art

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Culture

Grayson Perry on the search for originality in art

It always faintly depresses me when I’m trying to find arts coverage in a news website, and I have to get to it by clicking on the ‘Entertainment’ link. But that wasn’t what I wanted to say. I’ve mentioned Grayson Perry’s columns in the Times before; I think he writes well and his position as an insider of the contemporary art world doesn’t prevent him from exhibiting thoughtful scepticism. His latest includes this:

Crash my party you bastards, a work by Richard Hughes, one of the nominees, is made of artfully arranged debris. It reminded me of one of my tutors at art college who said he sometimes applied “the rubbish dump test” to work by students. If their work was thrown on to a rubbish dump, would passers-by say: “Oh, look, there is a work of art on that dump”, or would they pass by oblivious to the discarded piece of avant garde? To this day I am not sure which result constitutes a pass or a fail in my tutor’s eyes. If they had spotted something recognisably an art work, was that good or bad?

On the Beck’s Futures website the word “innovative” crops up several times. Terms such as innovative, original, ground-breaking and cutting-edge make me suspicious. These are not words an artist would ever use about himself or his work. They are PR terms, they are words used to engage a news agenda, to appeal to a desire akin to the male sexual appetite, a lust for fresh meat. The economist and social philosopher Ludwig von Mises said: “Innovation is the whim of an elite before it becomes the need of the public.”

I thought ‘These are not words an artist would ever use about himself or his work’ was a particularly interesting comment. It’s nice to think it’s true, but even if they don’t say it, it could still be driving the way the work.

As ever, I’m tempted to make this into a comment about poetry, but I’ll resist.

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Culture

Every Playboy centerfold

Go on, take a look. Via Design Observer.

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Culture

Rousseau at the Tate

Back to Rousseau. The painter, not Jean-Jacques. I’m afraid the exhibition, Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris is nearly over, so this won’t be much use to anyone who was trying to decide whether to see it.

Rousseau was a bit of an oddity. He was self-taught and, according to the exhibition blurb, he aspired to joining the academic, classical tradition. Instead, his work was very much admired by a younger generation of artists, like Picasso, whose work Rousseau apparently didn’t like much. Which makes it hard to know what to make of him. If he was literally trying to produce paintings that looked like academic works, then he failed. On the other hand, his similarity to the Modernists is striking – his work has a limited sense of depth, a strong sense of colour and design, and is highly stylised.

But of course, these things are also characteristic of folk art; they seem, in fact, to be typical of self-taught artists generally. This is a self-portrait by Rousseau:

this is an anonymous panel from the American Folk Art Museum:

So was Rousseau absorbed into the canon, rather than relegated to folk art status, just because he happened to be in the right place at the right time? Well, there may be an element of that, but he does have some distinctive things in his favour. His compositions and use of colour are gorgeous, for a start. The most famous thing about him is the choice of subject matter, of course, in the jungle paintings. There was a lot of good contextual stuff in the exhibition, much of which you can see on that website, to show that the jungle paintings weren’t quite as random as you might think. There were World’s Fairs held in Paris in 1878, 1889 and 1900, and sensational portrayals of Africa were in the air in the French equivalents of Rider Haggard. There’s a startlingly dodgy statue in the exhibition (not by Rousseau) of a nubile woman being abducted by a gorilla, for example. For that matter, the Cubist interest in African art is an only slightly more enlightened version of the same thing.

Kowing where he got his ideas from doesn’t make the paintings any less peculiar, of course. In The Hungry Lion Throws itself on the Antelope, it isn’t the central struggle that is most remarkable, it’s all the other animals lurking in the jungle – an eagle, an owly thing, a leopard and a weird gorilla-bear creature, several of them with strips of bloody flesh hanging from their mouths.

Anyway. It’s a big subject and I’m not about to do it justice here. Interesting though. I’d recommend the exhibition if you’re in London in the next 11 days.

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Culture Other

Linkworthiness

An art-type thing at Pruned, and via Interactive Architecture dot org, the Airship to Orbit program. Check out the animation, which has the cheesiest music in the world ever. Oh, and KLF’s The Manual (How To Have A Number One The Easy Way).

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Culture Other

Adult film posters (and some other stuff)

Adult movie posters, via we make money not art, who got it from Camp Heatwole.

edit: more linkworthiness. Dazzle painting, via gravestmor. It’s worth looking at the pictures and clicking on the links in the dazzle article.

further edit: Bangladeshi rickshaw art, via Metafilter.

and still more: Crop Art, also via Camp Heatwole.

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Culture Other

Chihuly at Kew

I went to see the Dale Chihuly glass at Kew Gardens today. Which was pretty fab. This Flickr slideshow gives you some idea. It finishes 15th January, so if you haven’t seen it and you’re in London, go and have a look.