Contemporary Art Criticism

This just about summed up how clapped out and inane the contemporary art scene is….not content with just posing inane speculative theory grounded in nothing or as Bourriaud states..

Like modernism and postmodernism, though, it’s not easy to sum up in a sentence. When I ask for the one-line Wikipedia version of the theory, Bourriaud is cautious, saying it is a ­complex idea that can’t be simplified (FYI, Wikipedia defines altermodern as “an ­attempt at branding art made in today’s global ­context” and says it’s part of a commercialism backlash).

Bourriaud, who co-founded Paris gallery Palais de Tokyo and has ­written influential­ tomes on art theory, describes today’s superstars like Hirst as making “very static artworks” which are on their way out.

from The London Paper

Well there you have it - it too sophisticated to be explained…..I was going to give it benefit of doubt but when I see an article proclaiming a ‘new world order’ illustrated by a picture of a man wearing a badger on his head ( Marcus Coates - I kid you not:-) here it is…well what point satirising..it done for me…)

The basis of alter modernism is ‘it moves around a bit’ ..because of age of mass travel stupid artists can move around the globe being well..stupid and that’s ok?

The fact that it attempts to replace ‘postmodernism’ ( i.e. real theories based in real world) with a theory based on ‘travel’ just at point where the collapse of capitalism will mean fewer artists travelling ..indeed most will find it hard getting work of any kind is ludicrous in the extreme. Like many so-called ‘movements’ before the design of the catalogue is good (..proper design agency Paris involved) and we have the conceit of welding disparate concerns into a box of the curator’s ideas…(typical posture - there been goodness how many attempts in last two decades to get WOW factor moving again post..’Sensation’ Saatchi’s ragbag advertising coup which enfeebled subsequent generations of British artists). So now we all ‘altermodern’. Bullshit.

Bourriaud is a typical game-player and self-publicist and shame on the Tate for falling for his inept trendy theories and shocking lack of substance but as we live in an age of form over content and curator over artist I am no longer surprised. There will be decent work in the show even Bourriaud will get it right occasionally but as for a new movement….just ask Friends of the Earth or any serious grounded envoronmental artist if the new world order one of travel…exactly…

Maybe curators can travel first class in the new world order…for the rest of us its buses and tubes as usual and drivel from on high whether it be banker or man with badger on head……

Love to hear Brian Sewell on this…for now Ben Lewis does a lovely job on it

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/show-23592557-details/Altermodern:+Tate+Triennial+2009/showReview.do?reviewId=23636018

CODA
From Moogee on Guardian blog in response to Charlotte Higgins on Wallinger’s Geegee..

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/charlottehigginsblog

As Marcus Coates is presently being touted as a symbol of Nicholas Bourriaud’s ‘Altermodern New World Order’ for wearing a badger on his head maybe we could build a statue of Nicholas with his head up a horse’s rear instead?

Thereby we would not only be creating a visual affirmation of our own cutting-edgeness but also showing a clear sign to our continental knowledge economy rivals of how brilliant we are….of course it would not be built of local cement that no longer exists….a bit like the Oxford Mini..a casualty of global market I’m afraid but the frisson of the impermanent would tie in beautifully with the altermodern golbal perspective…in fact lets retrain all the unemployed car workers to be curators ..

On second thought lets just forget the whole thing and spend the money wisely instead ….a very modernist idea whose time may finally have come….

CODA 2 and 3

Wallinger is a ray of sunshine in a bleak artworld..I like Charlotte will look forward to the show..
see my comment on M.W. from 2008 here..

http://belcheresque.wordpress.com/2008/01/21/art-politics-ed-vaizey/

A more compliant bunch than that would be hard to find. Indeed Wallinger stands out as one of few artists who had more in common with the left wing artists of 1970’s e.g. Conrad Atkinson than their cash-laden capitalist benefactors. To see how the colour supplement crowd actually got into bed with mass-marketing (most notably with Charles S.) and how that coincided with a lot of spare ‘profit’ from banking in late 1980’s is a book unwritten…they went hand in hand of course….

BUT…

how the hell did he end up being involved in something as rightwing as spurious regeneration

If his politics are to be believed ( and I do believe he sincere) did he do it for a joke and it all gone terribly wrong….???

sad…

I just read Jilly Cooper on said horse…it so stunningly idiotic a piece of writing it defies satire..just read it for oneself….
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/feb/12/ebbsfleet-landmark-art-jilly-cooper
British culture is in safe hands….or should that be whip hand?

I wonder if she would have said same if it had been a giant statue of a car worker with his nether regions exposed towards Europe?….

the enthusiasm may not be so great then eh Jilly

toodle pip darlings….

http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/altermodern/manifesto.shtm

Altermodern
Manifesto
POSTMODERNISM IS DEAD
A new modernity is emerging, reconfigured to an age of globalisation – understood in its economic, political and cultural aspects: an altermodern culture

Increased communication, travel and migration are affecting the way we live

Our daily lives consist of journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe

Multiculturalism and identity is being overtaken by creolisation: Artists are now starting from a globalised state of culture

This new universalism is based on translations, subtitling and generalised dubbing

Today’s art explores the bonds that text and image, time and space, weave between themselves

Artists are responding to a new globalised perception. They traverse a cultural landscape saturated with signs and create new pathways between multiple formats of expression and communication.

The Tate Triennial 2009 at Tate Britain presents a collective discussion around this premise that postmodernism is coming to an end, and we are experiencing the emergence of a global altermodernity.

Nicolas Bourriaud
Altermodern – Tate Triennial 2009
at Tate Britain
4 February – 26 April 2009

Eyeblog review
http://blog.eyemagazine.com/?p=150

To be serious for a moment (it happens) the last post  from Badam saddens me greatly. I too was a ’serious’ artist with unpaid bills, a freezing studio, an interview at Goldsmiths (same year as Hirst if accepted..I wasn’t ..too serious for the times it appears..Fuller/Bacon self-portraiture didn’t ‘hang’ well with a interview panel of a graphic designer, a conceptualist and a student who hung black bin liners in rows…I kid you not.. to look for the real tale of why art where it is go to the enfeeblement of the art schools by profit and Thatcherism and YBA’s)…

I hung in there in the starving artist manor a lot longer than most - in fact until 2004 when I finally did teacher training and I now teach multimedia students.

What saddens me is that Saatchi being a willey coyote knows that with the collapse of state support as grants and the recession hit the art schools we will see a downturn in both student numbers and ability as working class students fail to make the financial sacrifices demanded of them. What chance a new Hockney, Moore or dare I say it Hirst these days??

Then Hey Presto! here comes a new income stream for his ‘global reach’. No longer able to afford art school ..just log on and become a famous artist Charles’s way…no need for time consuming education. The fact that one in a million becomes your betting chance of success as opposed to 1 in 25 or less AFTER graduating from the Royal College or any other Art School (official statistics reveal that you may become a teacher but a successful artist….well you have a cat in Emins chance)

So as art education collapses for lack of support who better to take over the education of our new ‘elite’ than…Saatchi Enterprises..who was rumoured to be preparing his own Art School as we speak..privately funded of course and what better way to promote it than getting prime time BBC2 coverage to get it going…no fool that one.

He no more interested in the talent than Lloyd Webber……their real talent is pushing their tie-in profit making concerns..via these programmes…pure Cowellism.

Musicals or Singers or Artists its all the same racket….

As for Badem…do it for yourself mate there are no silver linings, no Galleries paved with gold…..my lesson in reality started early.

Unable to attend a Royal College M.A. in painting because Thatcher slashed funds I wandered into a gallery with some slides….

‘Don’t bother showing me the slides’ said the gallery owner..
“Dear boy we toddle along to the Royal College M.A. every year and pick the ones with prizes’ They choose for us the rest like you are forgotten….”

How true…

So well done Charles for proving that nothing ever changes..as for poor students…at least they don’t have to waste years paying off loans..they can be rejected from the get-go.

A Rake’s Progress indeed?

I shall be first in line for dismissal in The new Depression Gallery….

Laura Cumming finally gets it right????????….

It is not only the artists and galleristas that at fault but also the reams of mediocrity served up by so called critics who happy to party on their benefactors terms until the party over…

It is obvious to anyone with eyes that art has become more vulgar and rebarbative during our lifetime, as well as slicker and quicker. Whether we will ever progress to anything better - more subtle, refined, intelligent, inventive, perhaps even original - is anyone’s guess, but these hard times have got to be propitious.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/jan/25/art

Some of us have been saying that for years dear..glad you finally seen the light..

Funny Ms Cumming didn’t mention any of this when covering some of the major players in last ten years but when the mood changes hey presto..to be fair she has shown more sense than most..not as much as Robert Hughes but then you talking different class…

How come it was so great in 2007 and so bad now Ms Cumming or are there no freebies any more, no dazzling parties, no paid tickets to the balls…?

Yes these are good times for art - lets kill all the fat and fatuous geese..and some critics too for good measure..Hughes would never have written tosh like this …..allegedly a report on the Venice Biennale of 2007 by one L.C….cake and eat it comes to mind ???

A golden crop, a vintage year: that is the main news from Venice, with a better ratio of hits to duds than any biennale in decades. This is no small matter since the Greatest Show on Earth is now so huge - 800 artists, every continent represented - that it overflows one island and spills through six others, not including the fanciful ‘occupation’ of the city’s floating necropolis by two artists demanding last rites for the Swedish monarchy.

But the other good news is that this year’s director, the well-respected Robert Storr, has organised such a strong international exhibition that it makes the tortuous miles of the Arsenale count as never before and puts the national pavilions in proper perspective. Storr’s thesis in ‘Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind’ - that conceptualism is the lingua franca of global art - may sound obvious but it’s allowed him to group together many giants of contemporary art. Where else are you going to find Louise Bourgeois, Ellsworth Kelly, and Sigmar Polke superbly displayed alongside the great film-works of Yang Fudong, the droll paintings of Raoul de Keyser and the fabulously groovy portraits of Malik Sidibe, the African photographer who has won this year’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement (the prize for best pavilion is not announced until October), not to mention dozens of upcoming stars? If only the whole thing could be flown afterwards to Tate Modern what a momentous innovation that would be …

MOMENTOUS..or CRAP? Your call…over to you L.C.

Moogee waits with baited dog breath….

Charles Saatchi, the Citizen Kane of the art world, is about to transform himself into the Andrew Lloyd Webber of art.

A new BBC2 series, Saatchi’s Best of British, will see him preside over a contemporary art reality show, comparable with Lloyd Webber’s I’d Do Anything. Talented hopefuls (I’ve put that phrase in as blog-fodder …) will attend his “intensive art school, where they will be tutored by top contemporary artists.” The show will “attempt to discover the next Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin.” Well, I don’t suppose anyone would expect it to discover the next Cy Twombly or Jasper Johns. Continue reading…

I cannot really add to this ..the final nail in ‘brit art’ seems like a good comment to make..note the ‘judges’..they not artists of any worth just spurious artists-cum-celebrity types I expect..Creed, Emin, whatever…step forward for some exposure as your sales plummet darlinks…

It time all of this sh*t was bagged up and tagged with its true nature..i.e. it celebrity compost nothing more…

The saddest part is that those who pretend to know what they on about i.e. Arts Council and various arts organisations are terribly impressed by all this ‘exposure’, they long ago gave up pretending they could invoke any form of standards so now we have no common principles to work to..so quality and talent are jettisoned for ‘fame’ and joke opportunism like this.

Nothing here wasn’t flagged up long ago by the Saatchi website….if you allow people with no values and no taste to dictate to you then you get the artworld you deserve.

I for one long ago stopped playing in the saatchi sandpit and looked to people with true value to provide a deifferent definition of ’standards’. Sorley Maclean in poetry, Howard Hodgkin in painting, Ken Loach in film there plenty of real artists around just they haven’t been much favoured in Saatchi Land’s carnival of minor celebrities……people of substance….not telly addled clowns…

For those with short memories there was a hilarious version of art school where various ‘intellect-challenged’ Chelsea School of Art scenesters tried to teach various celebrities to make art…a forerunner of this barrel-scraper of an idea…..

In that show such ‘artists’ as shown below changed the art world forever
Looks like this will be much the same…..i.e. rubbish

At least John Humphrys said what he thought….doubt if anybody in Saatchi Show will…oh and BBC2 as well- What a shameful waste of taxpayers money sayeth the man on the Battersea omnibus…if you don’t succeed give up next time and save us all the effort….

Five celebrities - John Humphrys, Ulrika Jonsson, Keith Allen, Clarissa Dickson Wright and Radio 1 DJ Nihal Arthanayake - are filmed taking part in a two-week crash course in fine art with tutors from the Chelsea College of Art. The series culminates in an exhibition; Winkleman’s role is to interview them throughout the fortnight.

Yes the artworld is waiting with baited breath for the shows judges to be revealed……

Here my betting slips…

Hester Von Blumenthal the III

fresh from revitalising Little Chef the cheeky chappy from the fat duck shows that the thin line between art and fine cookery is non-existant. Hester reveals that his whole premise for being a chef was it a stepping stone to being the greatest artist since Hogarth….his crispy fried duck will be shown at next year’s Venice Biennale as an example of site-specific cuisine..

Jade Goody
Jade has been doing body art for a few years now and will bring a fresh and provocatively ’street’ angle to the art world….she already in talks with the Gagossian gallery for a major retrospective (after Madonna’s) and has let slip that Emin and Goody will open a new gallery in 2010 focussing on Fashion as Art….

finally the greatest artist in the world…..yes Rolf Harris will down tools for a second. Long enough to bring a much needed sense of tradition and actual technical ability to bear on our assembled ‘conceptualists’ , ’site-specificers’ and ‘film makers’. Rolf will show them the correct end of the brush to use in episode one before doing an in-depth anlysis of the horrors of sable hair-plucking in a co-production with the RSPCA. Chanel Plus and some Tokyo cable channel.

I also hear there a famous surprise guest….yes….after disinterring Picasso’s bones his corpse will be ‘re-animated’ by forensic scientists in a tie-in with Waking the Dead. It is hoped that Picasso’s involvement will bring a much-needed sense of dignity to the show.

It rumoured that the winner will get to produce a family portrait of the Saatchis ‘en plein air’ like Stubbs…..a treat indeed

keep watching punters it can only get better from here on in….

Recession TV and Bankrupt ideas .com copyright all rights reserved….

Response to Waterlog: Fables of the Saturation (Saturn’s Rings)

What follows is part review, part polemic written after viewing the show on Monday 24th September 2007.

Surrendering the Physical Space

Third area triumphalism: sponsored by Ace East Anglian Regeneration and Film and Video Umbrella + etc and so throw back to 1970’s and 80’s. - who makes ‘videos’ any more? Work that looks good on the internet or in theory but lacks depth in practice. Worst culprit Finlay and Guy Moreton = bad photos + bad concrete poetry = good art..so we are told….

More panning shots = film and ‘authenticity’ - landscape photos that make up in scale and printed ‘quality’ what they lack in composition - cf. Raymond Moore….no contest this is ‘illustration’ that all.

Spurious commentary, faux text art, limp ideas conceived as mediocrity piggybacking on other artists e.g. let’s throw a few references to Benjamin Brittan in. Indeed only the bell-ringing piece reveals any kind of purely aesthetic plausibility. Tacita Dean’s ‘art-umentary’ was unavailable but looks like more post Taylor-Woodisms…probably post Arena solipism. Leave it to the professionals. Two artists implicitly quote Michael Hamburger as subject - again hoping he will provide intellectual ‘ballast’ for shaky boats they are floating?

Is this the ‘High Water Mark’ we are seeing of a certain kind of modern irony (post -anti -recycled- ironicism at that). Concrete poetry, deadpan documentary - the assimilation of ‘museum collection’ pieces (Pope) which trade faux morbidity and memorial incompetance for genuine creativity. Pseudo-memory tricks and use of ‘real’ people on trips around Lincoln may set up nicely the next funding opportunity angle but says nothing about the actual area..historical skimming…internet knowledge substituted for depth and reality.

A landscape without a landscape…..

A quick check reveals that all the artists ‘involved’ in project have no real connection to the landscape..less in fact than Sebald himself…truly OUTSIDER ART…..playing to gallery and patronising to locality and locals.

The waterlogged Raft of The Medusa a la Gericault.

Compare with a ‘real’ memorials like the USAF bomber crew signatures on ceiling of the Eagle, Cambridge or Swan at Lavenham.

Sebald’s oblique desire to get at the ‘truth’ is acknowledged as being ‘unobtainable’.

These artworks are imitative, illustrational and sometimes simply non-sensical….but they act the part proffering a oblique sense of their own worth as ‘art objects’ no matter that their formation based on pilfering and quotation not inward depth.

When the physical nature of an art/i/fact is surrendered totally to intellectual ‘re-fabrication’ the fabric itself becomes immaterial (literally) - disolved and drowned in dissonance and (dis)illusion.

A fish viewed through water offers us a mangled image. These are waterlogged ideas…weighed down by their own conceits and leaving no room for trancendence or fulfillment.

We emerge exausted as if having clogged our way across a muddy field. Saturnation.

For a very pretty website which applauds itself throughout go to…

http://www.waterlog.fvu.co.uk/

As a professional ‘misery guts’ and also a professional creative I somehow come from both sides of
the argument at the same time….

Having taken all that bitter rant to a new location by transforming it into the artwork itself how thendo the more scathing of the above commentators ( especially the first past the post nocturnal expert who has little else to do) going to react to venom as art?

Probably not all that well and…..oh dear there I am again consigned to the scrapheap of irrelevance in the archive….nothing new there sweeties…

I brushed up against Charles and his mob early on and indeed went to the show near Liverpool Street. The arguments were sound the art was not and I thought then it lacked technical ability and no fruit of the Vine has convinced me it has changed since…sorry Charles. Saatchi accomodated it and removed its sting by snatching at the Vine and the Tate and Serota can now easily brush it aside like flies off a Hirst.

Serota created a marketing opportunity by driving up South Bank retail activity on a scale that has lead to similar schemes across the country. From an economic standpoint he a genius and deserves all he gets.

His Tate Boredom is less successful despite the hype which must be maintained to justify the rash of similarly blighted projects across the country now the ‘extra cash’ in the punters pockets not jingling so freely.

Some things it does well…some things badly. The John Lewis food halls with ‘artistic’signatures and the badly hung floors are one side of the coin…the Twombly the and Fred Williams the other. …one thing one cannot accuse Serota of is not knowing his art though.

The Stuckists have always had an eye for the PR opportunity ( very new-Tory there) and JJ you have sadly served their purpose well again as the replies show.

There are larger problems with the intrinsic structure, nepotism and wholescale destruction of value in the art world. Solid scholarship and sound criticism have been all but undermined by the flush of cash. Catalogue entries became advertising jingles…..movements became PR stunts….artists became curatorial pawns in a heady dance on the ashes of skills and tradition.

That is the real rot in the barrel of plenitude and splendid aisles we now traverse.

I sometimes dream of another art world where Jopling and Saatchi never appeared where Artscribe and Modern Painters and Peter Fuller did not cease to exist in a vibrant, critical form. An art press not dependent on favours, nepotism and Gucchi adverts. Of course it just a dream….a fantasy…

Values are such unfashionable things and can blight ones career so badly…

Until then I will continue to seethe in the wings with all the other poor failures and provide such good copy for the metropolitan elite with their effortless superiority.

Or maybe just maybe….there is truth inour reality somewhere after all……an uncomfortable truth those who have most to lose should the rules change…would rather ignore or disparage…

There’s the rub methinks….

self promotional link follows….

http://www.shaunbelcher.com/fineart

after all no criticism ever hurt as much as being ignored…..

Comment on Jonathan Jones blog entry ‘Francis Bacon: The man’s a bloody genius’

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2008/sep/15/francis.bacon

I was so dazzled by both the myth and the man that I tried to be him for a brief few years in 1980’s before the fever lifted. I’d agree that he not better than Matisse or Picasso that a given ..I’d also add not as good as Braque whose interiors have a similar constrictive space.

What I loved then and still love whilst not being as mad keen on the actual works ( Kossoff and Auerbach have more essential ‘positive’ humanity in my opinion) is the fact that he lived and breathed painting and nothing else..no conference meetings. no academic puff, no phd madness…just art.

In my opinion Bacon and School of London will still be there on the art world timeline in 100 years time long after the fin-de-siecle speculators wet dream of YBA and Brit art has been erased totally.

NOTHING and I mean nothing produced by a ‘British’ artist since 1988 can come close in quality, depth and essential ‘meaning’ to Bacon. He was not the catalyst for these pretenders to throne he was their nemesis..they were beaten before they started.

Hirst recently praised Bacon ( a sixth-former’s reading will lead inevitably to the flies…oh the horror, the horror) but dismissed Auerbach showing that he knows no more about painting now than when he painted a cat all those years ago…Hirst cannot paint any more than Jade Goody could have been a conceptual artist (although who would say she not more savvy than Emin?). To hint at Goya, Schiele and Bacon as precursors shows the so called geniuses of Brit Art way out of their depth.

Bacon is a triumph and stands alongside them rightly and the Tate show will prove that. What we have to endure in the Tate Modern as representative of British Art since does not..time to paint out that horrible starbucks hoarding of artists signatures or at very least remove a few ‘pretenders to the throne’.

In sequence…Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Bacon…..yes….

Picasso, Braque, Matisee, Bacon, Hirst, Emin, and Opie for god’s sake…

‘Yer having a laugh Nicky baby’?

wine with your fries?

Struttin with some BBQ
1995
1991 - 95 (NY, Cologne) - Mischtechnik auf Fieberglas
122 x 103 cm
Copyright : Leonard Bullock
Courtesy : Galerie Poller, Frankfurt am Main

Dear Mr. Belcher,
I was touched by the raw honesty of your letter. It gives such a generous & unguarded picture of your struggle to continue to practice making art. I admire you. Perhaps it is unfair, but I still hold England to be contemptuous of pursuits which are non utilitarian. Naturally, I mean this generally. The exceptions to this stricture there are legendary. Nonetheless I think Howard Hodgekin (sp?) was spot on when he said upon receiving the Turner that to be an active painter in England one was
already in “enemy territory”. Despite the enormous fanfare of the London scene this remains both under & overtone. What the London scene seems to defer to most of all is spectacle. {Status in public isn’t far behind.}

There are now many articles about the professionalizing/ academicizing of the art school; there’s an art history instructor at the University of Virginia named Howard Singerman who wrote an entire book on the subject which I haven’t been able to get my hands on. I have read little pieces of it, and responses to it , but at the moment I can’t find this stuff, so I can’t even give you the title. I’m sorry. I know this doesn’t do you much good. The reason I mention it is to say you’re not alone in thinking this was a make-work farce which became a horrible travesty. The schools now promulgate much of the, what the Germans call “Austellungskunst”: exhibition art.

I honestly haven’t done that well myself. My life as an artist has been like a roller-coaster. I have shown in a few famous venues; won some prestigious scholarships & awards; the problem may be psychological. That I must admit. Though I think it is also my stubborn desire for my work to continue to change. I am not one to settle into a signature style.
I live in a W.G. here. It means wohngemeinschaft: shared apartments. I have to most of my money into the maintenance of the studio and the art. One of the main reasons for staying here these last few years is that I have my health insurance here. I had a radical cancer scare back in 2003 and if I’d been in the U.S. I’d be dead.They took care of me here, and my friends & family really came through. Your family must recognize that you are devoted. I hope that you are one of the ones who can say their family appreciates what they do. Or at least has grudging respect. My family has gotten the news, although they’d rather I made enough money to participate in the family events in every season. At least half of what traveling I can do I do to try to sell my work, or to do short teaching engagements. I just scrape by. It’s nerve wracking. These isn’t any remedy. One either has enough enjoyment of the practice as it is, so that in & of itself it is satisfying; or there’s the bitterness, which leaks in unavoidably when it becomes apparent what an institutional charade much of this has become. Unfortunately one can sustain both. I do.

The field is rife with people who are almost allergic to techniques and even a dialogue about techniques and the significance of the materials to the practice; unless of course you’re speaking of new technology. I think it is curious the amount of antagonism there is to the dialogue about materials & techniques, and the teaching of it as well. At least there is here in the german speaking realm. The general gist is that these things don’t carry the same syntactical, or metaphorical status as vocabulary & figures of speech do in linguistics. As if the properties of forms are like a clothes line upon which on hangs (verbocentric) meaning. As if no meanings or implications arise >from form. This is couched in many terms but it really is driven by puritanically reductive habits. Ok, I’ve strayed from my intentions here. Let me go back.

In England things have changed in that London is genuinely an international art center. This doesn’t mean that the plight of artists who are trying to develop their own critical “systems” for sharpening their own critical acumen for developing some kind of form ; hybrid form we used to call it; sorry, its a bit of the old N.Y. school in me. ( I come by it honestly. I lived there for nearly twenty years.) There are many more grants and art fairs and public institutions now, but doesn’t mean that the curators in those places are out scouring the country for artists who have developed independently. Hell no! They’re looking for much of the same trivial/topical trash their curatorial peers seek. It isn’t far removed from fashion; its safety in numbers. To say that curators are risk averse is much too kind. They are bidden by the higher institutions on the food chain to bow to the pecking order. Europe isn’t like it was in the 70’s, when there were exhibitions of Americans and asians and artists from the U.K. who were given their first major shows in intrepid Kunsthalle’s and small museums. Sometimes they were the ones letting N.Y. know what was going on right in its own backyard. Today it is all a part of the same machine. There are small institutions which haven’t been given their bona fides yet. But usually there’s a young curator there who’s waiting for the chance to prove he/she can play the toady, be recognized as someone who knows what’s good for him; show they’re willing to play the game and be granted access to the next tier.
You have to take these theoreticals with a grain of salt. It’s your right, and I hope your pleasure, to let them know that they no longer rule the art world uncontested. This is something you can do sotto voce. A few years ago Joseph Kosuth was here in Basel. His work is of the ilk that describes an intention, literally. When the pieces are made they sometimes unintentionally invoke questions of their own necessity as objects. I remember Saul Ostrow, a critic in N.Y., used to say,
“Joseph Kosuth is a really smart guy who does really stupid work.”( That should be one that you can fire off next time you have one of them in the studio.) Anyway, Joseph was here in town for a show and we know each other glancingly; so we had dinner. Other than tell me how he fucked my girlfriend 20 years ago, there wasn’t the kind of fireworks I expected. The reason was I just wasn’t so much interested as I would’ve been ten years earlier. I told him that I just didn’t agree that it all naturally flowed towards verbal interpretation, towards the <verbocentic> route he’d hewn for so many years. It was humorous the way he reacted. He was disappointed, I could see it. I was willing to debate other things with him, so he knew I wasn’t ducking a fight. But this which he’d staked so much on, well, I told him it was one choice among many. The day in which this attitude was thought inevitable is past.
I’m very pleased you know about the show in Edinburgh. I’m proud to have done that. It was a splendid time. Just before I came back to Europe in ‘94. Was there for two months in Edinburgh. Did a lecture at the Tramway, I believe it is called, in Glasgow. Then a friend of mine came from Cologne and we went to the Hebrides for two weeks: Islay, Jura, Colonsay.

We camped several days near the Ardbeg distillery on Islay, amongst the goats, seals and hundreds of birds. The seals would swim up into the cove to check out our camp site. Driftwood was our only fuel. Even though it rained, I kept a fire going for three days. I remember those meals fondly. The islanders were very warm. I’d never had so many strangers buy me whiskey. Well, we were there during the highland games.

The show was put on at a gallery that is no longer in existence, as far as I know. It was called “out of the blue”. Trudy Gibson was one of the girls, girls; they’d castrate me in N.Y. for that. She was one of the owner directors of the gallery. We got wonderful reviews, yet sold nothing. Trudy and all the people who were participating in the gallery worked very hard to publicize it. A show like that, of something really contemporary from N.Y. is a very rare thing there, I realized. Someone at the lecture asked me afterward if this show was representative of the “End of Ideology” attitude in the U.S. after the fall of the Soviet Union. (I think I answered that I didn’t think we’d get so lucky, and of course we haven’t. The winds just blow from other directions.)

I’m going to do some research on the names you sent me. I’m sorry that I’ve gone off a bit here. Would like to go further, but I have to get to work again.

Thank you again, and I welcome mail from you, or comments which you might post.
Please let me know, Leonard