On Expensive Paintings as Metaphors of Themselves

Funny how very expensive paintings become metaphors of themselves. The 45-million-dollar Duccio bought by the Met in 2005 shows the incarnate deity supported with infinite care by his reverentially gazing mother, in prophecy of the object’s later veneration by acquisitive museum trustees. Similarly, Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks, picked up by the National Gallery in 2004 for a mere 35 million pounds, predicts its own historical afterlife as object of enraptured awe: the Madonna both supports and frames the child, holding it and owning it. Actaeon unveils the nude Diana at her bath, like a museum director pulling a curtain cord at a press conference, in a Titian bought by the National Gallery for roughly the GDP of Belgium in 2008. In all of these works, the looked-upon object of attention is, like a work of art, something between divine and physical, capable of redeeming (Christ) or cursing (Diana) the life of the observer. It’s all in the viewer’s use of what he or she beholds. Look how, in Duccio’s painting, Christ returns the touch, or how Diana’s body, the whole shebang, is stretched out for Actaeon’s grateful view. These paintings dramatize rapture at the sight of a beautiful thing.


Read the whole post here.

"Leo Steinberg, Art Historian, Dies at 90"

Masaccio, Virgin and Child, 1420s

"At the risk of belaboring what is obvious, I must address myself to the many who still habitually mistake pictorial symbols in Renaissance art for descriptive naturalism. To take one example: At the sight of an infant Christ touching the Virgin's chin, they will admire the charm of a gesture so childlike, playful, affectionate. They are not wrong, but I think they are satisfied with too little. For the seeming artlessness of what I shall call the chin-chuck disguises a ritual form of impressive antiquity. It is first encountered in New Kingdom Egypt as a token of affection or erotic persuasion. In Archaic Greek painting the gesture is given to wooers, and it occurs more than once in the Iliad to denote supplication. In Late Antique art, the caress of the chin is allegorized to express the union of Cupid and Psyche, the god of Love espousing the human soul. And the gesture proliferates in medieval art into representations both of profane lovers and of the Madonna and Child. Thus no Christian artist, medieval or Renaissance, would have taken this long-fixed convention for anything but a sign of erotic communion, either carnal or spiritual. By assigning it to the Christ Child, the artist was designating Mary's son as the Heavenly Bridegroom who, having chosen her for his mother, was choosing her for his eternal consort in heaven".

[Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion]

Read Steinberg's obituary here.

On Marcus Coates' 'The Trip'

All travel is retrospective. We don’t travel for the experience – most traveling time is spent waiting, after all – but in order to have something to remember. The easy editing abilities of digital photography have transformed utterly the modern idea of travel. It’s all peaks, no troughs: the past perfect. Journeys only really exist once they’ve finished, and every story starts at the end.

The Trip is a 35-minute film by the artist Marcus Coates that consists of two long, still shots of the same thing: the interior of a room in a hospice in north west London. You see a flat-screen TV, a wall-lamp, and a window giving onto a quiet suburban road. In one of the shots, the day’s color drains, barely perceptibly, from the sky. In the other, the morning’s light is still, steady, the sky windless. Unseen between the two shots, each one lasting the duration of a dialogue heard on the soundtrack, is the event of the title: a trip to the Amazonian rainforest, which is discussed in voiceover in both parts of the film. The disparity — both comic and poignant — of what’s seen and heard is part of the point. The trip, undertaken by the artist, is plotted in the first section and recounted in the second. Nothing of the trip itself is shown: it happens in the two men’s dialogue and in the mind of the viewer. The trip was proposed by one of the men, a terminally ill man named Alex H., and was carried out and described by the artist.

Read the whole article here.

Some old ideas, collected

Here is a recap on some pieces I wrote a while ago that might while away the inevitable.

On Anthony McCall's contemporary baroque at the Serpentine Gallery

On Guido van der Werve's abject romanticism at the Hayward

On saints' names and their influence on a person's life

On Tala Madani and bad taste in painting

On what makes paintings from the 1980s actually quite good

On what the problem is with contemporary art curators

On Rodney Graham and Erasmus

On the contemporary art bubble

On why Jeff Koons = Michael J Fox

On trying to make sense of the Venice Biennale

On Glen Beck's analysis of thirties design

On the difficulty of remembering works of art

On Avatar, Gauguin and the end of the world

On why contemporary art is the new Mannerism

On why painting and bad writing go together

On William Kentridge's historical consciousness

Other articles are available.

On Peter Hildebrand (Saatchi Online)

The first really noticeable thing about Peter Hildebrand’s paintings is their fostering of tensions: between the man-made and the organic, the neatly-limned and the wildly splodged. Against a background of drooled or spat-out paint, Hildebrand creates imaginary architectural structures, whose forms’ intricacies and details suggest vast, human-dwarfing scale. By turns recalling the spectacular fripperies of World’s Fair pavilions (dodecahedral structures out of Buckminster Fuller recur) or the grim blankness of corrective institutions (panopticons and H-blocks), Hildebrand’s loopy architectural fantasies seem wilfully unbuildable, like Antonio Sant’Elia’s impossible futurist buildings. The allusion to utopian modernist projects is of a piece with a strain in contemporary art that looks back at the failed visions of the last century like embarrassing family secrets, best kept hidden.

For Hildebrand, though, the modernist past is re-presented not as the materialisation of long-discredited political fantasy but as something stranger, wilder, and more irrational than orthodox readings might have us assume. In Hildebrand’s paintings, two apparently contradictory twentieth-century aesthetic and political movements are forcibly conjoined: the hard-edged asceticism of Bauhaus utopianism and the lurid gut-spilling of Surrealism at its most unbridled.

Take, for example, his painting Fuller’s Glitch – its title perhaps a reference to the aforementioned Buckminster. Layers of paint are superimposed like webs. Close-to, the work (like many of Hildebrand’s paintings) has the obsessive layering and horror vacui detailing of Chris Ofili’s paintings of the mid-1990s. A brain-like next of pipes confronts a giant E-shaped turquoise structure, from one of whose fronds a small pink modernist building emerges, like a thumb. Simultaneously galactic and microscopic, Hildebrand’s painting juxtaposes the inner life of the creative mind, feverishly cooking up impossible architectural solutions to insoluble societal problems, and the expanses of the universe beyond. The neural analogy is perhaps intentional: “buckyballs”, molecules of pure carbon shaped like Fuller’s geodesic domes, are a much pored-over issue in nanotechnology. The tension between the visible and invisible, the impossibly large and microscopically small, is part of what charges Hildebrand’s paintings with their weird urgency.

In Hildebrand’s Pentagonia, a five-sided building, evidently based on the Pentagon, is elevated on slender stilts against a spray of white paint. It glows, like a halo. Vaguely spaceship-like, it tilts threateningly overhead, its sides sparkling with pixellated windows. This is an uninhabitable space, a reminder of the etymology of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (“no place”), a place comically uninterested in human access. Strutting on its spindly legs, like one of Dali’s disembodied heads on crutches, it seems unstable, somehow wobbly, like a dream leaving your mind.

Published on Saatchi Online, 28th Feb 2011. See the post here, plus my monthly top ten.

'Beat the Champ'

Whether or not computer games are actually any good for us – some argue they cause children to become withdrawn and asocial, and others suggest that they provide valuable life skills, like killing zombies with flamethrowers – there are certain life lessons all of them, whatever they are, eventually teach. Namely: spend long enough doing something and you’ll eventually do well at it, then suddenly regret all the time you spent doing it. Or: there are some things you will never be able to do, no matter how hard you try. There’s nothing like a video game – especially when the avatar is the almost exact physical opposite of the player, which is all the time – to reinforce a deeply-rooted feeling of loserishness. And that, roughly, is the subject of Cory Arcangel’s outstanding new installation at the Curve gallery in the Barbican Centre, called Beat the Champ.

Read the full review at Art21 here.

On Sculpture Being Boring

“Why is sculpture so boring?” So said Charles Baudelaire in 1848. Sculpture in Baudelaire’s time was boring. In actual fact, with some notable exceptions, sculpture was, for a very long time, very boring indeed. Have a wander through the Musee d’Orsay or the second floor of the Met and you might well be struck by the disparity between painting and sculpture in the mid- to late- nineteenth century. On the one hand, there’s Gustave Courbet’s ferocious, gnarled tableaux of ugly peasants and aggressively sexual maidens; on the other, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s dreary trudge through mythological subjects. With the occasional blip – all of Degas’s sculptures and some of Rodin’s – sculpture at the birth of modernism looked like something we were planning to ditch once we worked out what paintings should look like. This wasn’t new in the nineteenth century – Leonardo da Vinci had famously already slammed sculpture as retrograde and coarse, something for the horny-handed working classes/Michelangelo – and nothing had really changed by the time of Ad Reinhardt’s dinner party witticism in the 1950s: “sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting,” after which he waggled his eyebrows and pinched an heiress on the backside.

Read the whole piece at Art21 here.