Category Archives: Art
The going to score walk
I’ve seen it so many times I don’t even stop short when I see it anymore.
It’s a gait with purpose, entwined with intent. It’s not altogether fast, but it’s not slow either.
If those eyes aren’t aleady dilated in anticipation, you might still catch sight of them: dark and empty, yet filled with want.
One thing, one thing on your mind; until the point, the point, when you can leave it all behind.
On the walk.
From Hackney to Philadelphia via Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club
Rudimental, whose latest track I posted yesterday, are a four-piece outfit from my old stamping ground of Hackney. Interestingly, one of their older videos involves them running round North London in white rabbit suits. Their latest video to ‘Feel the Love’ left the rabbits behind and in the process intrigued me – featuring horses & riders in an über urban environment, so, I hopped on the Google, as you do.
Turns out, they shot it at the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club in Philadelphia, an amazing project that tackles unemployment, drug culture and crime through mentoring young people as they become involved with the horses. Like every good grass roots project, they need to fundraise so you can click here for donations and here to buy photographer Martha Camarillo’s book.
It reminds me a little of Mudchute City Farm where I used to ride with a friend, on the Isle of Dogs, behind Asda. The Fletcher Street project looks edgier somehow. I think it’s riding in hoods, not helmets, that does it. I was in Philadelphia once, the ‘City of Brotherly Love’.
I wish I’d gone to Fletcher Street.
Perhaps next time…
Expressing the ineffable
Is beyond the likes of me, so sometimes, when I start to remind myself of a clanging bell, I try for some silence. I say try for, maybe I don’t even do that, maybe silence knows when it is time to come and visit and I am still learning to accept the wisdom in the still quiet; to sit with it, hear it and know it, without falling back to fill my world once again with the familiarity of noise and bustle. That world, the place where we do and think, with no real action or thought. Or maybe that’s just me.
On the other hand, perhaps it’s not just me. I found this poem via Twitter and whilst I cannot express the ineffable, I feel that Rumi, the 13th Century Persian mystic poet has done just that.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I will meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about
language, ideas, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.
Outerer Klang
I figured, if we experience Kandinsky’s innerer klang (see yesterday’s post), we must definitely experience its opposite. And then I reflected, why should these concepts be confined to the art world, after all is not life, art. Or as the American writer and politician John Gardner put it, “Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.”
It seems, to me, that we are now suffering from life with a surfeit of, what I will call, outerer klang and not enough of the innerer variety. A world where appearances matter, more than much else as far as I can tell. Where the magic of a child’s world is redacted to a list of functional levels at school and where spin and smoke and mirrors make us so dizzy and sick we just don’t have the energy to care about the things we might anymore.
I could go on, but I won’t, otherwise I would be klanging too much as well!
Outerer Klanger
You decide
Van Gogh drawing
Innerer Klang
I need to find some. It’s nothing to do with the those funny little Clangers that lived on a planet far away, rather it is how Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky described the inner sound of art. That is to say how contemplation of the outer reveals something of the inner.
On reflection, that’s what I think might have been missing from some of Damien Hirst’s work. It’s like trying to find the Innerer Klang in the repeat pattern of a roll of wallpaper.
Or, maybe, if you listen too hard for something you won’t hear it anyway; too easily drowned out by the white noise in your own head…
A Clanger and, my favourite, the Soup Dragon
Damien Hirst Wallpaper - too much Klang, or not enough?
Kandinsky, Sketch 2 for Composition VII
Albrecht Dürer, Hare, 1502
This is a masterpiece, painted 510 years ago. The stillness, yet aliveness of the hare draw me in.
I never make haiku up, I write them direct from an observational moment in life. For me, this hare is the ultimate visual haiku; you couldn’t add to it in words for the last half a millenium, or the next.
It’s eyes have a little fierceness to them, but it retains the hunted quality of a prey animal.
I wonder if, some days, I identify?
Grand National 2012
I have said everything I would ever have to say about the Grand National in the past. The only thing, I might add, is that I don’t think it’s a race for a Gold Cup winner and if I think about it too hard it makes me feel sick.
Here’s a picture instead; I prefer Degas’ racehorses to the ballerinas, although I can appreciate those too.
Knowing the Aintree crowd, there’ll be both on the course this afternoon.
Degas: pastels on paper, National Gallery of Canada
Nothing Gets Written
Without writing itself in some way, or another.
There has to be space for it to come in. Creativity, of all kinds, is simply creating that space. That’s how I see it at its most basic level.
There is a blog to be written, but the space I might create for it to get done is not just mine; it sometimes needs to be taken up with other things and sometimes other people need to take it from you or, rather, you need to give it to them too.
There needs to be space for other people’s creations, allowing room for others into your life, physically and metaphysically.
Creating the space is often, necessarily, a solitary pursuit but as John Donne pointed out,
No man is an island entire of itself
Improvisation 12 ~ Wassily Kandinsky
Damien Hirst: A Private View
I originally called this post Damien Hirst: bedizening death, but I kept spelling it wrong, and no-one knew what it meant. Hirst once described his work as ‘decorating death’ and in the first title I was kind of agreeing with him and taking the piss out of his own titular mouthfuls for his art, but sometimes it’s just better if a blog post does just what it says on the tin… so, here goes.
Last night I was invited to a private view of the new Hirst exhibition at Tate Modern, an opportunity for which I was suitably grateful (thank you Finky Wink). Not because I have ever been a particular fan of Hirst’s work, but rather because an evening in an art gallery is always an enjoyable night out.
The last major retrospective private view I was lucky enough to be invited to was over ten years ago: Patrick Heron’s at Tate Britain. I went as a friend of the family and afterwards there was a dinner, over the river at the Glasshouse, with the artist, who was an elderly man. That was the first thing I noticed about last night’s view, that there was no sense of intimacy with the artist himself. Of course you would not go expecting to see Hirst as such, let alone have dinner, but I do believe there is the opportunity at any exhibition to get a sense of the artist, even in their absence, because you are in the presence of some element of them, in the art.
When I went to see Patrick Heron’s work, I was not a great lover of abstraction. I could hardly see the point of stripes. Yet there was something in Heron’s stripes that has not left me, ever. Something that spoke of himself. And if I am truthful, I still preferred his Cornish boats, but there was something about his work, including in the stripes, that stayed with me. It was in the colour, the execution; a quiddity, or essence of the man in the work, if you like.
As we processed round last night, the spectacles were indeed visually arresting, starting with this, the diamond studded platinum cast of a 18th century skull, called ‘For the Love of God’
The most expensive piece of artwork ever made, you were forbidden to photograph inside the darkened vault it is displayed in, so I just snapped this on the screen outside. The camera on the mobile phone added its own atmospheric laser-like beams of light. Nothing prepares the human eye for the impact of over 8000 diamonds, so the skull is worth seeing for its glitteriness alone, but is it art? It looks more like unwearable jewellery, or reliquary, but instead of us worshipping the bones of saints we admire the impossible sparkles, the cleaned-up, transplanted 18th century gnashers, and the sheer chutzpah of the artist who got a jeweller to make the piece to his specification.
And that was where I started to question what I was seeing; immediately after I had seen the skull. I did go with an open mind, I promise, having seen Hirst on the Channel 4 programme the night before (here’s the link to their own Private View), having found him engaging and interesting. However, when Hirst’s art starts to speak for itself the message does not translate into meaning for me. I suspect this is why he uses a lot of tricksy titles, the concepts need words to convey their meaning more clearly. As I walked round the exhibition, I got the sense that here was a man with a few key concepts, that he repeats and repeats, just bigger and blingier as his resources allowed. Boiling it down to its bare bones, as he seems fond of doing, it is: circles, a schoolboy’s anatomical fascination with death, lining thing up into rows and stacks, and finally doing it all again but bigger and with more bling. If you can be bothered to look about the web, you will find most of what he has done, has been done before, just not on the same scale. And there’s another problem: the doing of it. If you have people to do the work for you, the factory approach to art, where are you in the process? How do you speak to the viewer. A clever concept does not move the heart and soul.
As a meat-eater and leather shoe wearer, I am not sure I am entitled to a moral objection about the various fauna in formaldehyde. Of course these things rely on shock value, and the scale of the cow for example is impressive. There is no way Hirst did these things alone. And the form of the presentation leaves a lot to be desired. I found my eyes drawn continuously to the oxygen bubbles trapped in the vitrines. I found the fish boring, their scales dull; let’s be clear fish are not boring, think of the icy slab of a fishmonger, in this case it was merely the presentation. At one one point, I found myself having a debate in my head about the marks on the floor. I was looking at some white paint smudgey smears, thinking, I didn’t notice these during the Richter exhibition. Were they there then? Now, if you are looking at the floor wondering about the marks on in it in the middle of a major retrospective, you are in trouble deep. I like to think it was not just me; by the time we got to the last chest-height case with a preserved brown sheep in it, it was unremarkable, so much so that an elderly woman was admonished for leaning casually on it whilst conducting a conversation with a companion.
The animals are contorted slightly unnaturally. One might say that someone who pickles animals is unlikely to be showing the subject much reverence or respect, but the main sense I had was of an artist who failed to understand the intrinsic beauty of his subject, and rather than adding something he was merely redacting it. By the time we got to the contorted white dove at the end, a part of me was dying inside; my interest in conceptual art I suspect.
The iconic piece is, of course, the shark. When I saw it, I just thought, ‘Oh dear, he’s turned it into a sock monster’.
Here it is.
I went, wanting to like. I came away thinking it was empty. A clever idea is just that, a clever idea, unless you can translate it into something with meaning. Clever ideas are in themselves meaningless. They do not alone help us to understand things any better, or see things in a new and different way. The job of the clever idea is to get our attention, and then engage the senses, the feelings, the self. Hirst stimulates the senses with his giant ashtray and rank smell of cigarettes alright and some observers may be revulsed by the animals, yet strangely the experience is largely incomplete and perhaps, incoherent. Sterile?
But the main thing I felt was a kind of sadness, everything was so, ordered. Most of what is produced and placed in the gallery space should be somehow flooded through with energy, but everything is almost opaque. Glass cabinets with drugs stacked in them, stained glass ‘windows’ studded with butterfly wings – they are missing some transformational quality that I can only describe as light. Butterflies themselves, sharks, sheep and cows. Even the stainless steel items he has lined up endlessly in one room, all need a little space for the light to come in. Sadly, it seems that the ego casts a very long shadow, and money an all-encompassing one.
For me art is about an aesthetic, and according to Kandinsky, the aesthetic is spiritual. What I found was a poor sense of colour, an artist who does not understand light and an idea that aping the aesthetic sensibilities of religiosity and death is somehow saying more than has been said before. I am really sorry to say this, but, it doesn’t. It would be nice to see him close the door on all that and let some light in, but Damien Hirst is a brand now and I suspect escaping from those capitalist clutches will be an impossible task.
But maybe not. I sincerely hope I am wrong because I hate to write like this. The main exhibition is on from today until September. Entrance is £15.50. I didn’t go in the main shop, because let’s face it, he doesn’t need my money, but from what I saw of the merchandise outside the skull vault, it’s all expensive stuff. Go if you want a spectacle, but if you are hoping to be edified in any way, prepare to be disappointed.
It was revealing really, the programme on Channel 4 with Noel Fielding, who, in response to the photograph of a youthful Hirst alongside the head of a cadaver, said something like, ‘well of course they’re not there once they’re dead…’ And Hirst said that he’d never seen the dead body of a loved one. I can’t help feeling, in that admission, we were given a slight insight into the world of the artist. Rather than engaging with the world and bringing it into his art in any meaningful sense, he sort of keeps life and death at bay, bedecking it and playing with it all, like a child.
In the photo of Damien and the head, the dead man is not really there, and in his exhibition, neither is the fully-realised possibility of Damien Hirst, the man and the artist.
