On Vera Lutter's camera obscura photographs

Vera Lutter made a camera obscura out of an old leather suitcase and took it with her to Egypt, surreptitiously making images of ancient monuments (local laws being fairly punctilious when it comes to photography). The intrepid Tintin-meets-Capa narrative is a reminder that the romanticism thoroughly leached out of conventional ‘fine art’ in the 1960s still has a home in photography. Curled at their edges, intimate in scale, their clandestine provenance becomes part of the meaning of each work. The resulting negative images are as unsullied a representation of the pure photographic image – photography as ‘light writing’ – as a fixed image can be. Lutter’s photographs are, in other words, what images look like before language makes sense of them, and her practice involves geographical locations that are swamped and steeped in language: Manhattan, Venice, Egypt. Unphotographable places.

Read the complete piece at Art21 here.

On Ai Weiwei

When an artist dies, their work changes forever. Whatever it was they were doing at the time of their demise becomes loaded with retroactive meaning and spurious clairvoyance. With the exception of works knowingly produced in the inverted shadow of suicide – Rothko’s hyper-bleak late-60s moonscapes, almost anything on In Utero – most “late works” (in Edward Said’s famous designation) aren’t made with the intention of providing a tragic coda to a life lived publicly, but can’t help but acquire new meaning by virtue of their proximity to death. Painting especially does this: looking at Titian’s astounding Pieta, left unfinished at the time of his death in 1575 and completed by an assistant, it’s almost impossible not to be moved by the thought of the artist’s plague-crabbed fingers dragging pigment across the corpse of Christ. Even Duchamp’s Etant Donnes, designed in secret while the artist had nominally quit art to concentrate on chess, manages to acquire a funereal resonance in its evocation of a tomb (perhaps even The Tomb). David Foster Wallace’s recently published posthumous novel The Pale King will, as I write, be being scoured for allusions to his 2008 suicide, as though his life were lived backwards. In effect, all these efforts are part of the perennial human project to find meaning and pattern in the messy, unmanageable stuff of human existence.

Read the complete piece at Art21 here.

On Tiger Woods and modern art [NEW]

Above: a page from "How to Survive Modern Art" (Tate)

Tiger Woods is a profoundly uninteresting man, elevated to role model status in America by his unwavering commitment to brand promotion and the eradication of personal charisma, so when the revelations of his marital infidelities came to light in 2009, it was yet another contradiction of Fitzgerald’s too-quoted line about there being no second acts in American lives. Woods was being given a second chance, to save himself from the ignominy of living and dying the blank-eyed apparatchik of marketing departments at corporations everywhere. He was becoming a human, in the way that all robots in Hollywood films eventually grow a soul. Yet during the televised press conference, Woods’s charmlessness shone through like the sick light of a vandalized lighthouse. “I am truly sorry,” he intoned, auto-AutoTune-ing his voice beyond the wavering reality of the human larynx and by doing so, managed to simultaneously address and obfuscate the reality of his actions. Woods was using language against its function, allowing phrases like “my behavior has been a personal disappointment” to suggest contrition while denying his listeners access to genuine feeling. This is how an institutionalized language works: we’re telling you all we think you need to know. This is how language works in the art world.

Read the full article here.

EXTRA: Very kind words from Stephanie Vegh.

Hands-down, the best essay I read this week came from the ever-reliable Ben Street at Art:21 who composes a remarkable transition from the hollow contrition of Tiger Woods to the idiotic simplicity of art writing for a non-arts audience. With refreshing honesty and intelligence, Street indicts books for art’s newcomers that in attempting to dumb down artists and their respective movements for a general audience, serve only to shut them out of the conversation entirely.

New: catalogue essay for Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

I've written a catalogue essay for this show of Jan Fabre's work at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Details of the show are below.


Jan Fabre: The Years of the Hour Blue

The Picture Gallery of the Kunsthistorisches Museum presents a group of around thirty works from the series “The Hour Blue” created by Jan Fabre between 1986 and 1990; the show marks the culmination of a personal trilogy by the Belgian artist (Antwerp 2006, the Louvre in Paris 2008). Executed in blue BIC ballpoint pen, these drawings and three-dimensional objects interact with the highlights of the KHM’s collection on show in the Picture Gallery. In addition, important sculptures by the artist are displayed in the Entrance Hall and – visible from Maria-Theresia Square – on the roof of the museum, creating a fascinating discourse between the present and the past, the transitory and the eternal.

The works on show are loans from important private collections and international museums such as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Museum Kiasma in Helsinki.

For further information on Jan Fabre and his work please visit his official websites www.angelos.be (visual arts) and www.troubleyn.be (performing arts).

Ars Magazine: Rachel Kneebone

My piece for Ars magazine on Rachel Kneebone is now in print and is previewed here.

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.