http://search.deviantart.com/?q=by:cypherthepanicartist&section=today deviantART RSS for by:cypherthepanicartist en-us Copyright 2009, deviantART.com Wed, 09 Dec 2009 08:50:23 PST deviantART.com http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss http://s.deviantart.com/minish/widgets/apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png http://cypherthepanicartist.deviantart.com/journal/28535879/ http://cypherthepanicartist.deviantart.com/journal/28535879/ Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:51:12 PST What holy image attacked? Whose hearts shall I break? What lie
must I uphold? – In what blood shall I wade.”

Arthur Rimbaud, ‘A Season in Hell’, Arthur Rimbaud: Collected Poems, Ed. Oliver Bernard, London: Penguin Classics, 1962, P.306.


At some stage, even the greatest, most highly educated and cultured critics get it wrong, miss the boat or can’t see what’s staring them in the face. Ruskin got Whistler wrong. Greenberg got Warhol wrong, and Robert Hughes got it wrong when he panned Basquiat as a lightweight after Basquiat’s death from a drug overdose in ‘The New Republic’ in 1988. This article, which I first read in 1991 as part of ‘Nothing If Not Critical’ (1990), incensed me so much that I threw the book against the wall.


Looking back at this essay and others by Robert Hughes on Basquiat – I think the Australian got it so wrong in the case of Jean-Michel - though I appreciate the quality of Hughes' brand of acerbic prose. In his essay 'Requiem for a Featherweight' - Hughes panned Basquiat as a “small untrained talent caught in the buzz saw of art-world promotion, absurdly over-rated by dealers, collectors, critics and, not least, himself.” (Robert Hughes, ‘Nothing If Not Critical’, London: The Harvill Press, 1990, p.308) Hughes suggested that Basquiat should have gone to art college and learned some creative discipline and conventional drawing skills: “In a saner culture than this, the twenty-year-old Basquiat might have gone off to four years boot camp in art school, learned some real drawing abilities (as distinct from the pseudo-convulsive notation that was his trademark) and, in general, acquired some of the disciplines and skills without which good art cannot be made. But these were the eighties; instead he became a star.” (Robert Hughes, ‘Nothing If Not Critical’, London: The Harvill Press, 1990, p.309). I don't think there is a dumber notion in all Hughes' writing and I am all for good skills. The whole point of Basquiat’s work was that he was largely self-taught and unbroken by the nitpicking of tutors or fellow students. If you wanted a graduate there were already about 35,000 of them coming fresh out of college every year in America!


They said he was a flash in the pan; they said he was a shooting star – but over twenty years since his death - his abandoned work makes most of what has come out of New York since look academic, desperate, trivial and lifeless in comparison.

Like many young painters since – I could see the talent of Basquiat immediately. Of course he was not a first rank master but he had a startling and stylish debut. Basquiat’s real flaw was that he was a junkie. It was this that destroyed him mentally, physically and ultimately, artistically.


Basquiat had massively influenced my art from June 1990 – but it was only in January 1993 - that his presence in my work became overbearing. So much so, that many of my later critics and dealers derided my obvious borrowings from Basquiat’s use of text, diagrams, collage and skulls. Some of my works from 1990-1995 were little more than perverted, obscene and insane Basquiat’s. However, my early homage’s to this fellow Punk painter were based on a very limited knowledge of his work – a single painting seen in The Douglas Hyde gallery in 1987, a documentary on him in 1990, and a handful of small books. Trapped in Dublin in the pre-internet age – he was a subject of rumour and legend to me.

That changed in late January 1993, when I bought the catalogue from Basquiat’s sensational Whitney Museum retrospective which had been staged in October 1992. This exhibition was the first to treat Basquiat as an historical figure worthy of retrospective analysis. It was the largest selection of paintings by Basquiat that I had seen up to that point - and I was thrilled by his crude, virile drawing style, vibrant colours and visual sampling. I especially liked the way all of Basquiat's paintings, collages and drawings were delivered without hesitation - directly upon war-torn sheets of paper or ragged canvas. I was delighted by the way he would then tear up, over-paint or censor his previous efforts in a critical fashion.


With his words he would reverse or correct spellings, drop vowels and print, or scrawl or stab down letters. I admired the way he made language-based art without ever descending into the boring depths of conceptualism, and ultimately created a form of painting that was uniquely his own.


To a nerdy white boy afraid to leave the house who had spent his childhood trying to paint within the lines - Basquiat was like a liberator. The fact that he did all of this on his own terms in the dog-eat-dog, all white art world made him a hero to me and gave me some hope that I... ]]> *cypherthepanicartist http://cypherthepanicartist.deviantart.com/journal/27742198/ http://cypherthepanicartist.deviantart.com/journal/27742198/ Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:49:11 PDT
Hillsboro Fine Art, was directly opposite the Rotunda Hospital’s new entrance on Parnell Square. However when I arrived at the gallery at 10:30am - when it was due to open - I found the door locked and the galleries lights off. In desperation, I rang the intercom three times and then knocked on the door three times, before realizing there was no one there. From the window I could see a beautiful Schnabel painting on paper - under glass and framed in a lovely black frame. I was so close and yet so far!

I decided to go to Chapters bookshop in order to kill sometime - where I bought a small book on Egon Schiele. Then I went back to the gallery at 11am but it was still closed! So I went down to Easons’ to look around. It was absolutely packed with news people, photographers and slack-jawed heavy-metal fans, pressed around to see Ozzy Osbourne who was signing books. I saw the back of his head as he signed autographs but I felt contemptuous of the whole circus. I went to McDonalds and had a Big Mac meal, which I loved.

Then I went back to the Hillsboro gallery only to find it still closed at 12pm. I was just about to leave when a gallery woman came and unlocked the door. “Eh, is the exhibition still open to view?” I asked her desperately. “Eh, yes you can come in, but I am only here to receive a delivery.” She replied in a kindly manner. “Oh, thank you! I’m not a collector, I’m just an artist but I came into town especially to the Schnabel’s! I am a huge Schnabel fan!” I exclaimed. She let me into the gallery and turned on the lights.
Apart from Schnabel’s works, the Exhibition ‘New York Contemporary’ included small paintings on canvas by Ross Bleckner, Donald Baechler, David Salle and Jeff Schneider - none of which I was very impressed by - in fact I could think of countless Irish painters who had shown better works in Dublin in recent years. But, I was delighted and enthralled, by the Neo-Abstract-Expressionist Schnabel works on view.

He was represented by about six hand-painted screen-prints, with resin dripped on them. They dated from 1995 and came from editions of 80. In fact, despite the fact they were in part screen-prints, Schnabel’s personality oozed from them. Again, I was struck by the Joie de Vivre of Schnabel’s Neo-Salon brand of Expressionism and its total lack of angst. The colours were bold and strong – fuchsia pinks, cobalt blues, and darker blues and burnt reds - brushed on in semi-thick, textured, gestural strokes - around which he wrote words like; ‘La Blusa Rosa’, ‘Otono’, ‘Mujer’, ‘Invierno’, and Primaveral’ which gave the works their titles. The works reflected Schnabel’s new life with his Spanish wife Olatz and his visits to Spain that year.


They were inspired works, which relied on Schnabel’s subconscious manipulation of forms and materials. They reminded me of late Miro canvases that mixed surrealism with the sale and effects of Abstract-Expressionism and the later works of Cy Twombly with their ad-hoc mixture of classical words and abstract scribbles of paint. The largest pieces like ‘La Blusa Rosa I’ were about 40” x 32” where as the others were slightly smaller at about 40” x 30”. They were all works on stiff watercolour paper of an average quality. Dripped and pooled on the paper, was thick golden looking resin, in anthropomorphic shapes, which proved very effective and suggestive of phalluses or torsos. Even if to the uninitiated, his work could have looked slap-dash, haphazard and crude - I was struck by the artfulness within the apparent chaos of Schnabel’s work. I found his abstract works emotionally engaging and his brushwork skilful and measured. He just had a knack for making beautiful splashes and swirls of paint - which evoked thoughts of places and people.

There was also a colour lithograph based on a black and white photo of his stunningly beautiful wife Olatz. She looked out of the picture with a sultry stare, with her hands behind the back of her head - above which he had crudely painted in white ‘My Wife’. It was merely a family snapshot, given the professional artists gloss, of a fine art print enhancement and glorification. It was factory made Expressionism and the weakest work on show. The work was the 31st print, of an edition of 2000, and was selling for e2, 500! The more ambitious pieces were not priced. Despite the worst economic recession in Ireland since t... ]]> *cypherthepanicartist http://cypherthepanicartist.deviantart.com/journal/27741917/ http://cypherthepanicartist.deviantart.com/journal/27741917/ Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:27:33 PDT Keats

“His is the quintessential coming-of-age story, more commonly told in first novels than in the visual arts. Whereas older painters may wistfully look back on their youths, Schiele was one of the few who had the technical virtuosity to express those experiences as they were happening. His watercolours and drawings, executed so rapidly and spontaneously, have a diaristic quality. In these works, we watch Schiele literally grow up, almost day by day... Much of the uniqueness of Schiele’s achievement derives from the fact that he recorded experiences of identity formation and sexual discovery that older artists tend to repress – and he too, of course, gradually learned to repress them.” Jane Kallir, ‘Egon Schiele: Drawings and Watercolours’, London: Thames & Hudson, 2003, P.447.

“Orthodox modernism is the broad-scale and almost century long attempt to counter the complexity of the world with its own reduction. Egon Schiele, born in 1890, would attempt this on no lesser scale in his pictures, in paintings and drawings they reveal a phenomenal talent. And yet, despite their virtuosity, they indulge in a single perspective: the artist’s own enormous ego, which in a kind of tunnel vision narrows the natural panorama before his eyes to his own subjective sensations.” Rainer Metzger, ‘Vienna Around 1900: The Duration of Denial’, ‘Vienna 1900 and The Heroes of Modernism’, Editor Christian Brandstatter, London: Thames & Hudson, 2005, P.26.


For years, I toyed with the idea of writing about Schiele. However, I found the task unusually difficult. The essay I would have written as a teenager, was totally different to the one I have written as a middle-aged man. Looking at his narcissistic self-portraits and terror nudes at the age of fifteen, I thanked God for revealing a young man as tormented, bewildered and thirsty for carnal knowledge as myself. Looking at his nudes of teenage girls of similar ages to my own - my responses were that of a peer. Yet now as a middle-aged man, I frankly find many of them hard to look at. I have less difficulty with his drawings and paintings of the seventeen-year-old Wally and later of his wife Edith. Nevertheless, those from his Neulengbach period now strike me as highly problematic.


However, in one crucial respect my response to Schiele’s nudes has not changed – I think they are more than works of crass pornography - I believe them to be psychic explorations. After all, if Schiele had wanted to arouse his viewers, surely he would have produced work that created a fantasy about the body. His nudes on the other hand are quite different. He sought to show the self-possession, frailty, ugliness and heart-breaking humanity of his models. Yes, some of the poses of his models were that of the hardcore pin-up including scenes of masturbation and lesbian embraces – but many others were of that of the theatrical actress or pathological victim in torment. Therefore, in a sense - like his landscapes and town scenes - they were self-portraits in another form.


I think what Schiele was doing was playing a game of one-up-man-ship with his peers. Neurosis was fashionable in Vienna in the 1900’s, and Schiele must have decided to be even more neurotic and excessive than his peers and elders. Like Oskar Kokoschka who had drawn circus children naked in 1906-7, and later had become infamous for shaving his head like a convict, eating lumps of raw meat in public and having a life-size doll made of his bewitching muse Alma Mahler - after she had dumped him. Every bad boy needs a few doors to kick in.


Where Gustav Klimt had idolized, worshiped and elevated women to an impossibly beautiful and magnetic level – Schiele sought to reduce them to the level of himself – a carnal young man surging with hormones and obsessed with sex. As Erwin Mitsch (a past curator of The Albertina Museum in Vienna, which holds the largest collection of master works on paper in the world and one of the largest collections of Schiele’s works) observed in his groundbreaking book on the young Austrian: “Schiele’s eroticism is difficult to define. It is often accompanied by an expression of almost childlike, naive astonishment, and can suddenly take on the nature of helpless terror and deepest despair. Many of his exhibitionist representations of himself reflect this panic and a fear that closely borders on hysteria.” (Erwin Mitsch, ‘The Art of Egon Schiele’, Oxford: Phaidon, 1975, P.49).


Pornography is a curious thing. When it emerges, no matter how artfully it is ma... ]]> *cypherthepanicartist http://cypherthepanicartist.deviantart.com/journal/25440956/ http://cypherthepanicartist.deviantart.com/journal/25440956/ Sat, 20 Jun 2009 19:31:04 PDT
I had been lured out of my house to see The Quick and The Dead an exhibition of Irish Neo-Expressionists from the 1980’s. In 1986, Patrick Graham (b.1943), Brian Maguire (b.1951), Patrick Hall (b.1935) and Timothy Hawkesworth were featured in 4 Irish Expressionist Painters – a collaborative exhibition between Northeastern University and Boston College. The exhibition had been staged to coincide with Politics and the Arts in Ireland’ a conference held by the Irish Studies Programme in Boston College. All four had been born in Ireland, though Hawkesworth had emigrated to the U.S. by 1977. However he had begun to exhibit in Ireland since the turn of the millennium, including a show in The Royal Hibernian Academy in recent years.

The show in the Hugh Lane brought together a handful of their early paintings and a larger number of their most recent works to show how their art had developed since then. Although classed as Irish Neo-Ex’s these painters could also have been called Irish Neo-Gothic artists. Their dark, pained, thwarted and shamed paintings registered the morbid Catholicism of Ireland in the 1980’s amidst the hysterics of a dying religion. Graham and Maguire had been teenage heroes of mine and I had followed their work closely ever since.

Given our new economic crisis this show was timely as it transported us back to the troubled Ireland of the 1980’s. After a decade of prosperity and peace when we in Ireland had felt we could take on the world, we had seen our economic bubble burst and public unrest grow. Fear, panic and anger had returned to Ireland in the space of one calamitous year – so it was a perfect time to show these agi-prop works of the soul from the decade in which we had been called ‘the sick man of Europe’. It was also a reminder of the emotional, confessional and confrontational approach to painting that had been pushed aside by more photo and process based painting in the past twenty years. Plus, by featuring all Irish based artists it was cheaper to stage than one based on expensive, in demand foreign artists.

In the catalogue, Ireland was said to have been in a schizophrenic state in the 1980’s torn between the troubled past and an uncertain future. Apart from our economic crisis and the mass emigration of many of our most ambitious and talented young people - we lived in a state of fear and despair as we witnessed the outrages of Northern Ireland and fought cultural wars in the South around the subjects of; divorce, abortion, contraception, homosexuality, pornography and the role of the Catholic Church in modern Irish society. As such, the work of these and other Neo-Expressionist like Brian Bourke and Michael Kane – documented our cultural and national, identity crisis – or at least as it was seen from a very masculine perspective.

These angry, political and antagonistic Irish paintings - obsessed with the body and its place within the state might have been part of a Neo-Expressionist bandwagon but it fit the Irish character at the time like a glove. The grimness of Graham, Maguire and to a lesser extent Hall and Hawkesworth – went deliberately and defiantly against previous Irish academic art, abstract bank art and popular culture. They were accused of egotism, misogyny, socio-political incorrectness and the production of reactionary painting by their numerous critics – particularly those in the pages of Circa magazine. In the end their dedication and integrity had paid off and they all went on to be represented by our best private galleries, exhibited in our best museums and bought and sold by some of our biggest businessmen.

By and large, our painters in the early 1980’s lacked the finances and support of rich painters in New York or Cologne and so had to make ends meet as best they could. The Irish art world had always been small, but in the eighties it was especially restricted in terms of the number of active collectors. So denied sales, most painters had to apply to the Arts Council, for the cost of a large canvas and some paint. But the number of grants was small, the grants limited in finance and competition was fierce. Arguably the likes of Graham and Maguire achieved far more than most with what resources they had. They were also lucky to have the support of dea... ]]> *cypherthepanicartist http://cypherthepanicartist.deviantart.com/journal/24074111/ http://cypherthepanicartist.deviantart.com/journal/24074111/ Sun, 05 Apr 2009 11:18:24 PDT
I had first discovered The Goldfinch, in my father’s Heron History of Art books when I was a little boy and I instantly feel in love with it. However given its location in The Hague I doubted I would ever get to see it in person. The reproduction of the painting in my old book was very crude, dark, warm and yellowed with age - but magical all the same. So to see The Goldfinch in the flesh; the purity of the bone-whites and warm and cool creams of the wall, the subtly modulated dusty blues of the bird box, and the symphony of Naples yellow, burnt sienna and a myriad of flecked greys and ochre’s that made up the birds plumage - was intoxicating.

Little was known of Fabritius other than he was a star pupil of Rembrandt in Amsterdam and an early teacher of Vermeer in Delft – whose technique he clearly influenced. The history of art was full of hard luck stories, like when Camille Pissarro’s studio was ransacked by Prussian soldiers and many of his paintings were damaged or destroyed. But Fabritius was even more unlucky. He was killed with all his family in a fluke explosion at a gunpowder factory near his studio which also destroyed much of Delft. He was only thirty-two when he died. The fire also destroyed virtually all his paintings so that there were only about twelve paintings left in the world by this precocious and unfulfilled master.

The Goldfinch was a small and deceptively simple picture, just a solitary Goldfinch, perched and tethered by a slender chain, on a rail in front of its feeding box. These little birds were common pets in the Dutch Golden Age, where they were nicknamed puttertjes or little water drawers due to their agility at taking in water. It was 355 years old, yet it was in immaculate condition, a validation of Fabritius’ technique and the care taken over its preservation by the Dutch who considered it one of the most beautiful paintings of its Golden Age. Ironically this masterful painting may never have been intended as framed painting, but rather (given the thickness of the wooden panel) it might have been meant as a door to another encased painting.

It was a poem in paint, in which Fabritius had gone beyond mere trompe-l’oeil –and entered into the soul of this little Goldfinch. I looked at it repeatedly thinking that at any moment it might to come to life, sing or try to fly away. The brushwork was broad and direct but also very subtle and measured. The ghostly shading of the white wall behind the bird alone was beyond belief. I was astounded by Fabritius ability to shift even the tiniest portions of the painting from super-fine detail to enigmatic suggestion - in the space of a hairs breath. It was at once highly objective in its technique and humane in its vision, fresh in its paint handling and reasoned in its composition – based on an off-set x pattern. And it was the compositional purity and strength of The Goldfinch which drew me back to look and look again – even at home with the excellent postcard I bought of it. It was as close to a perfect piece of painting - as I had ever seen.

This exhibition, runs until May 24Th 2009, admission is free.

]]> *cypherthepanicartist http://cypherthepanicartist.deviantart.com/journal/24074092/ http://cypherthepanicartist.deviantart.com/journal/24074092/ Sun, 05 Apr 2009 11:17:02 PDT The show was dominated by pictures of pretty children, sorrowful children, pretty women, working women, social deprivation, middle-class bliss, winter landscapes and strange Nordic myths. Overall I found the technical standard of drawing and painting quite high. It was Salon art with workman like draughtsmanship, unusual compositions and odd pallets dominated by whites, greys, greens, pinks and blues– often in an attempt to outdo photography with minute details, intense lighting, obscure narratives and symbolically laden subjects.

The exhibition was divided up thematically into six sections; Naturalism In Finnish Art, Influence From France, Epic Landscapes, Legends and Myths, The 1900 World Fair and Early Modernism. In the first section there were some sorrowful paintings of children by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, but nothing compared to the apocalyptic looking painting Under The Yoke (Burning the Brushwood), 1893, by Eero Jarnefelt. It was an odd painting, combining the usually idealistic and flattering techniques of academic art - with agi-prop social record. The soot covered face of the little girl in the centre of the painting, her clothes in rags, standing in front of burning fires of wood, smoke billowing up around her - as she stared out bleakly at the viewer - haunted my nightmares for months to come. As social propaganda against; child labour, the exploitation of the poor and the ecological destruction of the land - it was compelling. Its grating Naturalism was unforgettable - however as art I did not think it worked. It lacked the universal vision of a true masterpiece.

Albert Edelfet was represented by Conveying the Child’s Coffin, 1879, a large luminous painting of a group of people on a boat - bring a coffin across a lake. In was typical of much of the socially conscious academic art of the 1870’s which was inspired by the socialist examples of French masters like Courbet and Millet. Edelfelt superbly deployed academic drawing, composition and tonal-shading – enlivened by a lighter more Impressionist inspired pallet - to record a grim moment in Finnish life. Edelfelt had captured the intense low light of the North excellently and the painting seemed to radiate. However it had a staged, posed and wooden feeling that made it unconvincing as great art.

Fanny Churberg was represented by some wonderfully fresh alla-prima paintings of skies painted with vigorous and intense flat brush strokes. In fact they were some of the few - free and sensual paintings in the show. On the other hand Pekka Halonen in The Short Cut, 1892 and later in The 1900 World Fair section with Washing on the Ice, 1900, managed to paint some of the bleakest, most depressing and frigid pictures I had ever seen.

Later in the Influence from France section, Albert Edelfelt was this time represented by much more atmospheric, sensual and romantic paintings of pretty young women; reading books under trees, learning to play piano, or posed looking invitingly at the viewer. Other’s like Gunnar Berndtson and Akseli Gallen-Kallela also proved themselves adept at making attractive portraits of pretty middle class Finnish girls - and recording the easy going delights of family life.

Some of the landscapes represented Finland as a barren, inhospitable, lonely wilderness. The extreme coldness of Finland depicted was unusually poignant to me - after weeks of temperatures as low as -3 degrees Centigrade in Dublin. So, I marvelled at these painters fortitude painting in an even colder climate – sometimes out of doors!

The unsurpassed masterpiece of the landscape section (and maybe the whole show) was Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s Imatra in Winter, 1893. This huge canvas of an icy river, bounded by banks of deep snow and trees densely frosted with snowflakes was epic in its intensity. Gallen-Kallela had managed to go beyond the merely picturesque to animated nature. His masterful and evocative use of a Mirada of whites haunted my imagination. However most of the rest of the landscape section was undistinguished - apart from its unusual Northern topography.
*cypherthepanicartist http://cypherthepanicartist.deviantart.com/journal/23003511/ http://cypherthepanicartist.deviantart.com/journal/23003511/ Wed, 04 Feb 2009 14:06:16 PST The first edition of the on line poetry and art zine Heavy Bear - is on line today - until the end of February.

It is edited by my great friend Jane Crown who is a very intelligent, witty and talented poet, blogtalkradio host and tireless promoter of other artists and poets.

This edition features the poems of over fifty talented contemporary poets, as well as two unpublished art blogs and art works by yours truly.

You can view this zine at: [link]

Peace

David

]]> *cypherthepanicartist http://cypherthepanicartist.deviantart.com/journal/21829102/ http://cypherthepanicartist.deviantart.com/journal/21829102/ Fri, 05 Dec 2008 10:01:52 PST

The history of art is a story of records and erasures. For every artist we the general art public chooses to remember there are a thousand-and-one that we consign to the graves of oblivion.


The history of art is also a tale of shooting-star artists, laughable artist’s statements, hubristic manifestos, zeitgeist propaganda, critical errors and public bad taste.


For the historian though such records like; newspaper reviews, gossip column articles, artists manifestos and outspoken opinions and predictions (right or wrong) from critics are worth their weight in gold. They tell the story as it happened - without the tiding up and ordering of historical memory. Bernard Dorival's book is one such gem. To my taste it was hilariously French - very grand, very verbose, very poetic, very philosophical, very concerned with paint and its application to canvas. I could not think when I had last read a book on modern art in which over 66% of the painters were unknown to me - but this book had them in spades!


Now bear with me while I list the artists he discussed and see how many you remember from art books or trips to the museum; Yves Alix, Francois Arnal, Jean-Michel Atlan, Jean Aujame, Balthus, Andre Bauchant, Jean Bazaine, Andre Beaudin, Jean Bertholle, Roger Bissiere, Camille Bombois, Franciso Bores, Jean-Louis Boussingault, Yves Brayer, Maurice Brianchon, Bernard Buffet, Jacques Busse, Christian Caillard, Aristide Caillaud, Jean Marie Calmettes, Julies Cavailles, Marc Chagall, Roger Chapelain-Midi, Roger Chastel, Giorgio i Chirico, Jean Cortot, Lucien Goutaud, Salvador Dali, Gabriel Dauchot, Georges Dayez, Francois Desnoyer, Jacques Despierre, Jean Dewasne, Jean-Jacques Deyrolle, Pierre Dmitrienko, Jacques Doucet, Jean Dubuffet, Bernard Dufour, Charles Dufresne, Dunoyer De Segonzac, Max Ernst, Maurice Esteve, Jean Eve, Jean Fautrier, Andre Fougeron, Robert-Edgar Gillet, Leon Gischia, Edouard Goerg, Emmanuel Gondouin, Marcel Gromaire, Francis Gruber, Hans Hartung, Auguste Herbin, Robert Humbolt, Henri Jannot, Le Corbusier, Moses Kisling, Felix Labisse, Jacques Lagrange, Andre Lanskov, La Patelliere, Charles Lapique, Robert LaPoujade, Henri Le Fauconnier, Jules Lefranc, Raymond Legueult, Jean Le Moal, Roger Limouse, Bernard Lorjou, Jean Lurcat, Alfred Manessier, Andre Marchand, Andre Masson, Georges Mathieu, Henri Michaux, Andre Minaux, Jean Miro, Luc-Albert Moreau, Louis Nallard, Roland Oudot, Amedee Ozenfant, Julius Pasin, Michel Patrix, Dominique Peyronnet, Jean Piaubert, James Pichette, Edouard Pignon, Andre Planson, Serge Poliakoff, Daniel Ravel, Paul Rebeyrolle, Rene Rimbert, Georges Rohner, Henri Rousseau, Pierre Roy, Gerard Schneider, Seraphine, Gustave Singier, Pierre Soulanges, Chaim Soutine, Nicholas de Stael, Leopold Survage, Pierre Tal-Coat, Yves Tanguy, Raoul Ubac, Victor Vasarely, Claude Venard, Vieira da Silva, Louis Vivin, Charles Walch, Henry de Waroqier, Wols, Leon Zack and finally Zao Wou Ki!


All that but only a few footnotes on bloody Picasso, Braque, Gris, Matisse or Modigliani - for a book covering painting from 1905-1958! God only knows how Dorival justified that to himself!


So how many names did you remember? I remembered the following: Jean-Michel Atlan, Balthus, Roger Bissiere, Camille Bombois, Bernard Buffet, Marc Chagall, Giorgio di Chirico, Salvador Dali, Jean Dubuffet, Dunoyer De Segonzac, Max Ernst, Jean Fautrier, Edouard Goerg, Francis Gruber, Hans Hartung, Le Corbusier, Moses Kisling, Henri Le Fauconnier, Andre Masson, Georges Mathieu, Henri Michaux, Jean Miro, Roland Oudot, Amedee Ozenfant, Julius Pasin, Serge Poliakoff, Henri Rousseau, Seraphine, Pierre Soulanges, Chaim Soutine, Nicholas de Stael, Yves Tanguy, Raoul Ubac, Victor Vasarely,Vieira Da Silva, Wols, and Zao Wou Ki! A little less than a third - and I had been studying French art since I was ten!


I mention all this for a profound reason - it beautifully illustrates for me - the power of history to forget. This book was only forty-nine years old yet it might as well have been four hundred years old for all its antiquated notions of; male geniu... ]]> *cypherthepanicartist http://cypherthepanicartist.deviantart.com/journal/21828946/ http://cypherthepanicartist.deviantart.com/journal/21828946/ Fri, 05 Dec 2008 09:47:28 PST Rudi Fuchs, ‘Julian Schnabel Versions of Chuck and Other Paintings’, 2007, P156.

“… for years I’ve seen that content lying in wait, heavy-handed, student-level painting, rich in reds and blacks, a great seething, gravelly substratum of vaguely ominous, cartoon-derived, funky critters. In fifteen years of jurying from Worcester to Washington, from Durham to Dallas, I have never, for example, juried a show which did not have at least one image of a menacing dog with sharp teeth. Now they are here in packs in the downtown galleries. Sometime late in the 1970’s, all this ‘content’, all this universally shared personal imagery’, gathered itself up, like Visigoths and came to Rome.”
Walter Darby Bannard, Quoted in ‘The New Image: Painting in the 1980’s’ by Tony Godfrey, 1986.

For much of my early career - I was criticized by those in the Irish art establishment - for painting in an adolescent manner. This was true in biographical fact as well as in my style and subject matter. However that is not to say that my ‘adolescent’ approach to art making was unique. The early 1980’s had seen a tidal wave of roughly painted figurative paintings and sculptures land on the shores of New York galleries – pushing out the minimalist blank canvases and diagrams of conceptual art.

Hilton Kramer summed up the change it taste that brought about the Neo-expressionist revival when he wrote: “Nothing is more incalculable in art - or more inevitable -than a genuine change in taste. Although taste seems to operate by a sort of law of compensation, so that the denial of certain qualities in one period almost automatically prepares the ground for their triumphal return later, it’s timetable can never be accurately predicted. it’s roots lie in something deeper and more mysterious than mere fashion. At the heart of every genuine change in taste there is, I suppose, a keen feeling of loss, an existential ache - a sense that something absolutely essential to the life of art has been allowed to fall into a state of unendurable atrophy. It is to the immediate repair of this perceived void that taste at it’s profoundest level addresses itself.”(‘Two Painters Explore New Wave’, New York Times, April 17, 1981).

At first such work in Italy was called ‘Transavantguardia’ in Germany it was called Neue Wilden, in England it was called ‘New Painting’. While in the US it was called ‘Neo-Expressionism’. It is this last term which I generally use myself in my own writings.


Artists like Baselitz, Polke, Chia, Clemente, Schnabel, Salle and Basquait lead this dramatic if brief change in taste. If cutting-edge’ art from the early 1960’s to the late 1970’s had been about impersonal techniques, styles and mediums - the art world from 1980-1987 was to be dominated by highly personal, intensely visual and emotional paintings.


Young Neo-Expressionists looked back to early German Expressionists like Kirchner and Nolde, the late paintings of Picasso and Philip Guston as well as a host of ‘minor’ Modernist painters like Marc Chagall and De Chirico.


Neo-Expressionist canvases were often large and theatrical, recognizably figurative but painted on the scale of murals with house painters brushes. They were often garishly coloured, crudely drawn, hastily painted and collaged with other totemic or personal elements. They included everything that had been stripped way by late Modernism. In keeping with this painters like Polke, Chia, Schnabel and Salle explored the ‘bad-paintings’ of Magritte, De Chirico and Picabia. The subject matter of some of this work was sexual – however (with the exception of artists like Salome and Clemente) it was very rarely overtly pornographic – these were very commercially minded artists after all!


Their paintings rough, violent, slap-dash figurative works - was the product of a liberal arts policy in the west which bad seen the abandonment of slow drilling in representational skills like; drawing from dirty and graffitied plaster casts in the college canteen, recording the fatigue and boredom of a life-model in the stuffy and smelly life-room, studying the anatomy of the figure in books and in mode... ]]> *cypherthepanicartist http://cypherthepanicartist.deviantart.com/journal/21828557/ http://cypherthepanicartist.deviantart.com/journal/21828557/ Fri, 05 Dec 2008 09:14:24 PST
It was my first trip to an art gallery in many months - and my first trip into town in weeks. It was less than one degree centigrade, and the cities buildings were cloaked in a cold mist. I felt like a stranger in my own city. I felt confused by all the new shops and lamented the passing of many of the icons of Dublin past. At the time I did not enjoy being out of the sanctuary of my home. I hated the crowds, the bustle and the bitter cold. However when I returned home I felt the benefit of a day out.


I found ‘Now’s The Time’ a delightful and inspiring exhibition that was both assessable and inventive. When I entered the first gallery of the show to see two large acrylic paintings and a very large oil-stick word drawing by Basquait - I let out a yelp of joy and grabbed Carol’s arm in delight. The drawing ‘Untitled’, 1983, featured diagrams and words mixed with crude childlike drawings of train lines, baseballs, skulls, lumps of coal - and seemed to be a brief treatise on; the use of Chinese labourers to build the American railway lines, the exploitation of the poor, the history of commodities and the history of African Americans. This I could all deduce from the words and images in the drawings and from over eighteen years studying his iconography. However, to the uninitiated this drawing must have seemed like a rambling list without rhythm-nor-reason - made by an artist who drew like a demented child. Even I as a rabid fan of Basquait’s work had to admit to Carol that it was a minor drawing by him.


A far more major work was the large acrylic and oil-stick diptych ‘Grazing – Soup to Nuts, MGM – 1930’, 1983. Painted with vibrant candy pink, baby blue, white, black and green oil-sticks on top of a ground of an eggy yellow - which had then been partly over-painted, with a matt black - making the whole diptych look like a demented school blackboard. In parts of the painting, Basquiat - had scuffed and smeared the oil-stick lines with the heel of his hand – giving the work a more raw, intense feel. Basquiat played off images of dinosaurs with diagrams of pelvises, intestines, and leaves - conjuring up in my mind - images from old Ray Harryhausen monster flicks from the early days of Hollywood and the jottings of a teenager in a copy-book. I absolutely loved it - and would have been ecstatic to own it.

The final painting by Basquiat in the show ‘Fat’s II’, 1987, was a far more minimal and stripped down text painting - clearly influenced by the abstract word paintings of Cy Twombly. In parts of the painting – snapped-off lumps of oil stick stuck to the canvas – like exclamation marks of haste. This huge canvas with a few dozen words related to Jazz - on a plain grey ground was a lesson in scale - it hurt me to take. How much more impressive would my paintings have looked - if I had been able to paint them on large canvases like Basquiat?


The rest of the show was a come down from the Basquiat’s. The zany Keith Haring acrylic and oil painting ‘Aids’, 1985 - simply looked like the kind of trippy, Robert Crumb inspired doodles - made by countless teenagers who fancy themselves as creative. As a painting, it had minimal interest in the flesh. Apart from the fact that the eye-popping, wriggly, drawing of monster figures having sex on a zany, yellow ground - looked black from six feet away – but close to revealed itself to have been painted in indigo blue. The lines in Harings painting were almost print-like – so limited was his exploitation of the subtleties of the brushed line. Like an Op-Art canvas this Haring was wearing on the eyes after less than a few minutes – leaving me in a daze.


Far more impressive was a suit of pencil and marker drawings on hotel stationary by Martin Kippenberger. The nine drawings that formed Untitled (The Invention of a Joke) 1991, came courtesy of The Kerlin Gallery – which made me wonder if I had seen them in 1991 as part of Kippenberger’s show with Oehlen in The Kerlin. However, I could not for the life of me - remember seeing them before – not a sign of... ]]> *cypherthepanicartist http://cypherthepanicartist.deviantart.com/journal/21567978/ http://cypherthepanicartist.deviantart.com/journal/21567978/ Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:02:44 PST

My one dispute with Hughes was his use of Pop artist friends like Robert Rauschenberg and Jim Rosenquist to support his argument. Both of these elderly artists carping about the art world had become multi-millionaires because of the art market. In fact, many of the old, venerated and rich art world commentators in the programmes sounded like whores in a brothel complaining someone had let a few young porn stars in the building.

The Second show ‘The Oligarts’ presented by Marcel Theroux - was the weakest of the three documentaries – but gobsmacking all the same. Of the half-dozen or so billionaire Oligarch collectors he interviewed only two displayed any refined taste– and even they seemed mercenary collectors without any soul. While two or three of them had such bad taste in fashion, art and homes – that they made twenty-year-old Rappers look like Kenneth Clark. I thanked my luck stars - to have failed at art. I thanked my lucky stars - that I did not associate with people like that.

The final show ‘Outback Art: The Gold Rush’ was quite simply the most disgusting and heartbreaking documentary on art I had ever seen – and it opened my eyes wide to the patronizing, manipulating and racist exploitation of dirt-poor, illiterate, marginalized and utterly exploited Aboriginal artists by cunning white super-rich trash.


The show dealt with the many fundamental sacrileges of the longest continuous culture in human history – dating back well over 40,000 years. The original Aborigines - before the white collectors came - drew in the sand, carved into trees and painted on rocks. They did not care if their work lasted – their land would always last – as would their relationship with it. They did not have money in their culture – and absolutely no tradition of the easel picture. Which we had developed in the West in the late 1400’s and which John Berger saw as an adjunct to emergent capitalism.


We all know the British invaded their land. We all know, that they were treated like dogs by the British, Irish and European settlers most of them criminals - who stole their land. We all know they were pushed off their land by successive generations of settlers. We all know they gave them no help other than food and drink. We all know they got them dependent on alcohol. We all know that they took many of their children off them - and raised them as white. We all know that they marginalized and ignored their plight for decades. However what they then went on to do from the late 1960’s to their culture, heritage and art – was a new one on me.


They set up community art centres in the deserted heart of Australia were the white man had pushed them into. In these ram shackle wood and aluminium panel buildings - they gave these poor people acrylic paints and linen canvas. Then they let them paint. Then the money started to roll in and they pushed more and more paint and canvas under their noses - to paint and paint. Aboriginal artists like many native artists – worked on the ground – so they painted on unstretched rolls of top quality canvas and linen. Once the paintings had been completed by the artists’ – the white men would roll them up - and bring them to the white cities. Then the canvases were put on stretchers and framed like western abstract paintings


In the community centres they said they gave the artists fifty percent of all sales. Yet the Aborigines were all in rags - lying on dirty beds and working in scummy studios that had not seen a lick of paint in decades. The galleries and offices of the whites - attached to these compounds though were very nice! The white people who claimed they worked for the a... ]]> *cypherthepanicartist http://cypherthepanicartist.deviantart.com/journal/21567951/ http://cypherthepanicartist.deviantart.com/journal/21567951/ Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:01:06 PST
When I first saw Hirst’s work in 1990 - I was convinced of his amazing talent and promise. Yet by 1992, I had already begun to suspect Hirst of vulgar commercialism. I thought he should have won the Turner prize in 1992 – and I was enraged when (the now totally forgotten bore) Grenville Davie won it. I cheered when Hirst won the Turner prize in 1995. However I felt that the Sensation exhibition in late 1997 - had finished of the yBa’s as creatively daring and challenging artists. With growing sickness I watched them go on to produce increasingly commercial, tacky, gaudy, grandiose, soulless and factory made art. They became pop-stars not artists, businessmen and women not creators, alcoholic networking whores not self-questioning interrogators of meaning. A damming indictment of Hirst to me was the utter forgetability of his actual art works. While first writing this piece on him I totally forgot I had seen his work three times in I.M.M.A in the mid to late 1990’s. Yet I clearly remembered Jeff Koons when he was in similar shows.


For weeks approaching Hirst’s auction - I read reviews of the forthcoming auction. About 80% of the reviews were critical of Hirst’s inflated reputation - though nearly all agreed that Hirst would make a killing. I was praying that Hirst would fall flat on his feet. His special kind of egotism, megalomania and greed - I felt deserved a vicious stripping down.

However my hopes were completely dashed. On the 15th and 16th of September 223 lots - paintings and sculptures by Hirst were auctioned to the highest bidder. Hirst sold £111 million pounds worth of art in the space of two days. After Sothbeys’ commission was paid – Hirst was able to personally pocket £95.7, (all of these figures come from reports in The Guardian, The Times, The Independent and The Telegraph published in September 2008).

The sale set a new record for an entire auction devoted to one artist – beating a sale of Picasso’s works in 1993. Even I had to take my hat off to Hirst the master media manipulator and businessman who amid the carnage of ‘Melt-Down Monday’ on the stock markets, the collapse of investment banks and doom-laden talk of recession – had timed his end of the boom sale perfectly. I also had to take my hat off to Frank Dunphy his North Dublin accountant who had masterminded many of Hirst’s coups including the Sothebys sale.

The centrepiece of the Sothebys auction was ‘The Golden Calf’ – a cow in formaldehyde, with gold plated horns and hooves - in a gold plated tank. Like ‘For The Love of God’ – it was a big money spit in the face - of art as an object of; pleasure, contemplation, critical thinking or liberation. I was reminded of Freud’s observations on the anal link between gold and faeces. It was emblematic of an art world reduced to meaningless media shock-tactics, uber-rich house decoration and vulgar assertions of vanity – both Hirst’s own and his supporters. It went for £10.3 - lower than its estimate – but sickening all the

The modern commodification of art only really began in the 1960’s – personified by Andy Warhol and his “factory” and he was to influence the business tactics of others like Jeff Koon and of course Damien Hirst. Art of course was bought, sold and collected in the early years of Modernism – but never on a significant scale. Before modernism individual artists like Titian and Rubens had run huge studios, amassed vast personal fortunes and counted amongst their friends most of the nobility of Europe. However these were largely exceptional cases.


Commodification began to have an increasing impact on the nature of the work produced in the art world in the 1960’s – either with an attempted seduction of the market as in Pop Art - or in a critical rejection of it – like in early forms of conceptual art in the 1970’s. The... ]]> *cypherthepanicartist http://cypherthepanicartist.deviantart.com/journal/21567929/ http://cypherthepanicartist.deviantart.com/journal/21567929/ Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:59:27 PST
I had feared that my fond memories of these television programs - would with the passing of time appear foolish. However, I was delighted to fall in love again with Tom Keating’s honest, humours, self-deprecating, intelligent and technically informative programs. They reminded me again - what a hero this portly, bearded and grey haired gentleman had been for me. Keating possessed more genuine, simple love for art - than hundreds of people I have encountered in the art world.

Tom Keating (1917-1984) was born into a poor family in London. After World War Two he worked as an art-restorer and house-painter. Keating was a skilled but frustrated traditional painter whose work had failed to make a mark in an art world dominated by American Abstract-Expressionists, Pop artists and Conceptual theorists.


In 1970, auctioneers became suspicious when thirteen unknown drawings by the English Romantic artist Samuel Palmer - all of the town of Shoreham - came up for sale. Doubts were voiced in The Times and in letter to the paper Keating confessed that he had forged them and may other works by other artists. He said he had made them to get revenge on an art world that he thought was corrupt and got rich at artists’ expense. He also revealed that he had knowingly left anachronisms and flaws in the paintings - which would later reveal themselves to restorers. For example before starting a forgery – he would write on the canvas in lead white, fully knowing that x-rays would reveal them instantly.


In 1977, Keating - was brought to trial - at the Old Bailey. It was revealed that he had forged over 2,000 paintings by over a hundred different artists. He claimed that his forgeries had been made to show up the art establishment. However the case was dropped due to Keating’s ill health - brought on by a life-time of chain-smoking and inhaling dangerous fumes from his restoring chemicals and painting turpentine. That year with the help of Geraldine Norman and Frank Norman he wrote and published his bestselling auto-biography; ‘The Fakes Progress: The Tom Keating Story’.


After the trial his fakes – now titled homage’s - and his own work began to be avidly collected. His last hurrah were these wonderful programs for Channel four in 1982 and 1983 - when he was in his mid sixties and in poor health.


In these half-hour television programs - made at the tail-end of his life - he showed how the painters; Titian, Rembrandt, Constable, Turner, Boudin, Rousseau, Manet, Monet, Degas, Renoir, Van Gogh and Cezanne - conceived, started, worked up, qualified and finished their canvases. As he made works in their style (often with tongue-in-check) - he told brief but telling stories of their lives, character, training and working habits. Keating modestly taught the techniques of tempera and oils and pastles, which kinds of brushes to use, how to grind pigments, how to prime canvases, apply glazes, use impastos, varnish paintings and handle the paint brush.


Keating said: “I am trying to encourage everybody to have a go… anyone can pick up a paint brush… it’s inhibition that stops even children… it just needs courage.” Yet at the same time he made clear the need for academic or self-training, the difference between genius and talent and those unteachable aspects of painting that required an inner vision. He also honestly pointed out how comparatively easy it was to copy a painting – since the forger did not have to imagine, compose and construct a painting from scratch and out of a highly evolved personal style – they merely imitated.


Keating most admired the techniques of the Venetian painters like Titian and Dutch painters like Rembrandt. Although he acknowledged that Titian was widely regarded as the greatest painter in the Western tradition – his favourite was Rembrandt whose humanity he found very moving. William Turner he regarded as the greatest landscape painter of all time.


As an old forger Keating frankly spoke of the difficultly of old master and academic techniques - which he confessed required more discipline, skill, craft, patience and professional focus – than Impressionist techniques. However he also spoke of the freshness, direct honesty and reality of out-door painting conceived by Constable, Turner, the Barbizon painters and the Impressionists. He also spoke of the courage and Christ-like humanism of Van Gogh and the obsessive dedication of Cezanne.


I noted to Carol that she could... ]]> *cypherthepanicartist