Blackpaint 218

Richard Diebenkorn

I’m quite bemused at Diebenkorn’s career, really; for my money, the earlier abstracts from the 50s and 60s are very much better than those of his second abstract period.  If you look at the Albuquerque, or Berkeley paintings, you see a series of rich, textured colour patches and tracts, marked and scored with black paint and sometimes (like Roger Hilton’s) charcoal, scribbles, smears and thickly-painted squirls in desert-tawny, red, greys and whites, sometimes a lavender or mauve.  They are, unmistakeably, abstractions of aerial landscapes.  I’ve gone on about them before, somewhere.

The Ocean Park pictures, though interesting, are much less so.  The colours are more sickly, the reds, yellows and blues thinner and more acidic (many are acrylic on paper).  There are ruled lines, geometric shapes – many resemble shuttered windows.  They’re  dead, compared to the earlier stuff.  Jane Livingstone’s book cites the influence of Mondrian here, and quotes his dictum that “chance must be avoided, as much as calculation”.  What, you may ask, do you utilise, if not  chance or calculation?  Mondrian’s  answer is “intuition”.

If you avoid the intervention of chance, accident, whatever you call it, I think you lose the possibility of that “life” that sometimes  is caught in a picture, flickering across or against a smooth, uniform patch of colour.  Diebenkorn’s early abstracts  capture a lot of  those moments – just check  the series I have mentioned.  The Ocean Park pictures, sadly, never do.

Bonnard

Something that I did not previously know about the above was that one of his models, Renee Monchaty, commited suicide – in  her bath.  And Bonnard discovered the body.This was  in Rome, in 1923.  He subsequently (and famously) went on to do a number of  paintings of his wife Marthe getting in and out of the bath and in  two at least, lying full length  in the tub.  Surely, whenever he painted a bath scene, he would have been reminded…  Clearly, real artists are different to the rest of us; I’m reminded of  Bacon painting George Dyer with his new lover’s head  substituted (see Blackpaint 96), and Araki’s wife.

Quiz

In whose work does a businessman sit in a bar with a chamber pot on  his head?

Millbank by Blackpaint

11.11.10

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Blackpaint 144

More Exposed

Some more photos and sequences from the Tate Modern exhibition:

• The Iraq convoy, smashed in the first Iraq war, like the Germans in the Falaise pocket (but without the hedgerows).  The WWI aerial photos, taken from about 500 ft, I thought – dangerously low, anyway – where you can see the individual soldiers advancing under clouds of shell smoke.  The Normandy cliffs, from higher up, but not that much.
• The sex in the Japanese park sequence, where the photographer actually gets in on the action, pushing the idea of voyeurism to its extreme.
• The Araki nude seen from behind, kneeling and resting her body across a chair or something, with a twist of her body at the waist; a beautiful life drawing pose, surprisingly, perhaps
• Various actual surveillance photos of barbed wire, hangar-like buildings, deserted roads, deserts.
• Northern Ireland army installations like cages; an IRA man in an armchair with a stocking over his flattened features.
• paparazzi photos of celebs, Marilyn, Burton and Taylor.
• The Kennedy assassination shots.

So, some great shots but all familiar; too much maybe, too wide a definition for one visit.  OK if you’re a member and can go back for a second or even third time.

Other Stuff

from yesterday’s visit, not  mentioned before;

• the drooping coils of Marisa Merz’s metal schlangs, dangling from the ceiling;
• The Dieter Roth plaque of blue,  pink and yellow card, treated with glue, next to the great (but small) wooden Schwitters;
• the strangely sexy pile of old clothing against the naked statue in the Arte Povera bit (didn’t get the artist’s name);
• Lucia Nogueira’s video of kite flying on windy verges in, surprisingly, Berwick-on-Tweed.  Why surprisingly?  because she was Brazilian.  I remember seeing her ink and paint-blot pictures a while ago.

Brief today, because not many readers on a Bank Holiday.

Blackpaint

31.05.10

Blackpaint 31

Conceptual Art

I think my problem with this sort of art is an unwillingness to engage with ideas that are not immediately apparent in the work.  If I have to read a plaque on the wall in a gallery in order to understand what the artist is saying, then the chances are quite high that I won’t bother.  I may still like the art; I may get a lot from it; but it probably won’t be what the artist intended.

I’m not sure whether this is legitimate or just crass.  Visual art surely should engage you visually; maybe its impact can be deepened by accompanying text – but if you end up writing great chunks of explanation (or having them written for you by critics), then it seems to me that you probably ought to make your message clearer visually.

That said, I’ve just trolled through the whole of “100 Contemporary Artists” (Taschen), both volumes, and the earlier “Art Now”, same publisher, and I haven’t found a single artist whose work doesn’t engage me visually to some degree, without reading the (mercifully brief)higher art bollocks written about each of them.  Some are more arresting than others, of course – and I prefer the painters, as I suppose I would.

Probably it’s because the conceptual artists are in a book rather than a gallery and you can return to that again and again.  as you flick through to your favourites, the others become more familiar and you start seeing things you missed at first.

More favourites: Tom Friedman – especially the “Green Demon”, Elmgreen and Dragset – the Prada shop in the middle of nowhere; Gursky, Albert Oehlen and Luc Tuymans.  and Pipilotti Rist – lovely videos and even better name.  But the images that stop me as I flick through are by Cecily Brown, Marlene Dumas, Tuymans and Oehlen.  Buy the book or look them up on the net – I’m worried about copyright if I attach images to this, other than my own.

Actually, there are two instances where I’m glad I read the text.  The first is Matthew Barney, who made the “Cremaster” series of films; there is a startling still of a red haired young man with pig’s (?) ears flopping down on each side of his head – reminds me somehow of a scene from “The Shining”.  The text reads, “The title of the series is derived from the cremaster muscle in the male genitals from which the testicles are suspended, and which is retracted in a reflex movement produced by cold or fear inside the body.”

The second relates to the work of Nobuyoshi Araki, who obsessively photographed his dying wife up to the point of death and beyond.  The text reads, “The photographs which have become emblematic of Araki’s work, however, are his portraits of young women – prostitutes and schoolgirls – either dressed or naked, hanging from the ceiling or thrown to the ground, their hands tied together, their legs apart, or even engaged in the sexual act.”  I’d like to know what Susan Sontag would have to say about him – this surely qualifies him as a “transgressor” ( Meaningless coincidence – Sontag was also photographed after death, I think, by Annie Leibovitz, wasn’t it?

Listening to Cyril Davies, “Chicago Calling”

“Well, Chicago calling, hear me call your name,

Yeah Chicago calling, come back home again,

I’m goin’ back to Chicago, Chicago callin’ me,

Yeah Chicago calling, Lord that’s where I long to be”

Blackpaint

06.01.10