Category: Art & Books

The Price of Success: Britain’s Tumultuous 19th Century

In 1858, an exclusive Soho dining society known simply as “the Club” – attended by former and future Prime Ministers, prominent clergymen, poets and men of letters – debated the question of “the highest period of civilization” ever reached. It was, they decided, “in London at the present moment.” The following year, several books were published which might, at first glance, appear to support this grandiose conclusion. They included On Liberty by John Stewart Mill, now a cornerstone of political philosophy; Adam Bede, the first novel by the great George Eliot; and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which presented the most comprehensive argument yet for the theory of evolution.

Certainly, all of these works were products of quintessentially Victorian seams of thought. Yet they also revealed the fragility of what most members of “the Club” considered the very pillars of their “highest period of civilization.” Mill’s liberalism was hostile to the widespread complacency which held the British constitution to be perfect. George Eliot, aka Marian Evans, was a formidably educated woman living out of wedlock with the writer George Henry Lewes; as such, she was an affront to various tenets of contemporary morality. And Darwin’s work, of course, would fatally undermine the Victorian assumption that theirs was a divinely ordained greatness.

These are just some of the insecurities, tensions, and contradictions which lie at the heart of Britain’s history in the 19th century, and which provide the central theme of David Cannadine’s sweeping (and somewhat ironically titled) new volume, Victorious Century: The United Kingdom 1800-1906. This was a period when Britain’s global hegemony in economic, financial, and imperial terms was rendered almost illusory by an atmosphere of entropy and flux at home. It was a period when the state became more proactive and informed than ever before, yet could never fully comprehend the challenges of its rapidly industrialising economy. And it was a period when Britain’s Empire continued incessantly to expand, despite no one in Westminster finding a coherent plan of how, or for what purpose, to govern it.

Cannadine’s interest in discomfort and dilemma also explains the dates which bookend his narrative. In 1800 William Pitt’s administration enacted the Union with Ireland, bringing into existence the “United Kingdom” of the book’s title. Throughout the ensuing century, the “Irish question” would periodically overwhelm British politics through religious tension, famine, and popular unrest (indeed, I refer mainly to Britain in this review because Ireland was never assimilated into its cultural or political life). The general election of 1906, meanwhile, was the last hurrah of the Liberal Party, a coalition of progressive aristocrats, free traders and radical reformers whose internal conflicts in many ways mirrored those of Victorian Britain at large.

Cannadine’s approach is not an analytical one, and so there is little discussion of the great, complex question which looms over Britain’s 19th century: namely, why that seismic shift in world history, the industrial revolution, happened here. He does make clear, however, the importance of victory in the Napoleonic Wars which engulfed Europe until 1815. Without this hard-won success, Britain could not have exploited its geographical and cultural position in between its two largest export markets, Europe and the United States. Moreover, entrepreneurial industrial activity was directly stimulated by the state’s demand for materiel, and the wheels of international finance greased by government borrowing for the war effort.

From the outset, the volatility of this new model of capitalism was painfully clear. Until mid-century, Britain’s population, industrial output, investment and trade expanded at a dizzying rate, only to stumble repeatedly into prolonged and wrenching economic crises. The accompanying urban deprivation was brutal – life expectancy for a working-class man in 1840s Liverpool was 22 – though arguably no worse than the rural deprivation which had preceded it. Nonetheless, these realities, together with the regular outbreaks of revolution on the continent, meant that from the 1830s onwards the British state assumed a radically new role of “legislative engagement with contemporary issues”: regulating industry, enhancing local government and public services, and gauging public opinion to judge whether political concessions, particularly electoral reform, were necessary.

The second half of the century, by contrast, hatched anxieties which were less dramatic but more insidious. Rising giants such as the United States and Germany, with their superior resources and higher standards of science, technology, and education, foretold the end of British preeminence long before it came to pass. Certainly, the price of global competition was paid largely by landlords, farmers, and manufacturers; working-class living standards steadily improved. But declinism permeated the culture as a whole, manifesting itself in a range of doubts which may sound familiar to us today: immigration and loss of national identity, intractable inequality, military unpreparedness, the spiritual and physical decrepitude of the masses, and the depravity of conspicuous consumption among the upper classes.

Cannadine recounts all of this with lucidity, verve, and a dazzling turn of phrase. He is, however, committed to a top-down view of history which places Westminster politics at the centre of events. This has its benefits: we gain an understanding not just of such fascinating figures as Robert Peel, Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone, but also a detailed grasp of the evolution of modern government. This perspective does, however, run counter to the real story of the 19th century, which is precisely the redistribution of historical agency through expanding wealth, literacy, technology and political participation. Cannadine might have reassessed his priorities in light of his own book’s epigraph, from Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: “Men make their own history, but they do not do so freely, not under conditions of their own choosing.”

Eliot’s Waste Land and the crisis of artistic value

 

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead trees give no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water

– T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

 

I had a professor who used to say there was an exact moment when modernism arrived in English poetry, and it was the third line of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” This is when Eliot, in a sudden and disturbing image, describes the evening sky as “Like a patient etherised upon a table.” The simile still carries a punch today, but this is just an echo of what it signified on publication in 1915. Drawing heavily on the jaundiced outlook of French symbolism, Eliot was making poetry confront the emotional register of modern life, with its lurking anxieties and peculiar sense of estrangement.

But the awkward young émigré from St Louis, Missouri, did not end his contribution to modernist poetry there. Seven years later, in 1922, he published what is widely seen as its landmark work. The Waste Land, written while Eliot was recuperating from a nervous breakdown, is a five-poem sequence which considers from a mythological perspective the febrile and traumatised civilisation that had barely emerged from the First World War. Using an innovative collage technique, it splices together desolate scenes of ordinary life with references to cultures distant in time and space. It thus portrays a world haunted by the wellsprings of meaning from which it has experienced a terminal rupture.

At the heart of the poem, thematically speaking, is the “waste land” itself – a series of barren terrains whose most prominent features are absence, infertility and confusion:

The river’s tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.

Around this void-like centre are layered a multitude of different voices or perspectives, all expressing the same anxieties, but isolated from one another by the poem’s abrupt, fragmented structure. Hence the “waste land” is echoed not just in the mundane suffering of individuals (“He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you / To get yourself some teeth”) and at the level of civilisational uncertainty (“Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal”), but also in the impossibility of piecing it all together. And strewn throughout, we find an eclectic array of characters and quotations from world literature, including Plutarch, Ovid, St Augustine, Dante, Spencer, and the Buddha.

Of course neither abstruse experimentation nor pessimism were unusual in interwar literature. But even so, The Waste Land is remarkable for its over-wrought intensity. Eliot himself made light of this when asked for some explanatory notes to help baffled readers, producing an index of intellectual arcana that discusses everything from ancient vegetation ceremonies to the price of raisins. Indeed, it’s difficult to pin down exactly how much conviction Eliot had in his more apocalyptic pronouncements, and ultimately, whether you find the poem a compelling diagnosis of the modern condition or something akin to intellectual masturbation will probably depend on your own demeanour.

However there is one area where The Waste Land has undoubtedly proved prophetic, and that is in the arts themselves. I was reminded of this recently by an exhibition at the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate, called “Journeys with The Waste Land,” which explores how Eliot’s poem has resonated with visual art across the last century. The show is worth discussing, because it does indeed manage to illustrate some of The Waste Land’s most prescient insights – only, not in the way it actually intends to.

The exhibition is enormous. With almost a hundred artworks, and too many big names to list here, there is bound to be something you will enjoy (for me this was Kathe Kollwitz, Paula Rego, Tacita Dean, and four huge paintings by the Eliot-inspired abstract expressionist Cy Twombly). It is also stimulating to see how non-Western artists, despite very different contexts, have echoed The Waste Land’s vision of modernity. But ultimately, these brief insights are diminished by the exhibition’s sprawling incoherence. Besides being curated around big baggy topics like identity, myth, and technology, it presents such a smorgasbord of concepts and of media – from painting, photography and textiles to installation, printmaking and video – you eventually feel like you’re winding through an enormous out-of-town supermarket.

There are also unconvincing attempts to assign to The Waste Land the preoccupations of the 21st-century art world. In the first room, we read that the “key themes of the poem” are “gender, myth and journeying” – I must have read it fifty times and never has its concern for gender struck me as anything but incidental. Later, The Waste Land is portrayed as an eco-poem, “reminding us of our interference with and damage to cycles of nature.” It’s fitting, then, that the show occupies the same beach where Eliot wrote the lines “On Margate Sands. / I can connect / Nothing with nothing.” With its aimless approach, connecting nothing with nothing is exactly what this show has done.

But inadvertently, “Journeys with The Waste Land” does illustrate something important about art over the last century, and to greater and lesser degrees, about many areas of contemporary culture. For what we see reflected in the exhibition’s radical diversity of expression, and in the tenuous attempts to glue it all together, is the absence of any stable or enduring framework for artistic value. It is a labyrinth of niches and paradigms which, though perfectly capable of aspiring to value on their own terms, can only be appreciated together if one adopts a detached, scholarly relativism. By failing to make this explicit, the curators have missed a trick; for here is a situation to which The Waste Land really is pertinent.

As we have seen, Eliot’s “waste land” is an allegorical landscape, a disorientation at once cultural, spiritual, and psychological. Yet underpinning this, and in a sense embodied by the poem itself, is also a treatment of the uncertain purpose and meaning of art in modern society. When Eliot asks, in a crucial passage, “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?” the question is partly self-referential. For as is suggested by the poem’s ephemeral, obscure and disjointed allusions to lapsed literary traditions, art can no longer be part of some holistic cultural and religious whole. This must be true because culture itself has become a shattered prism without any central axis.

This realisation, in turn, casts a revealing light on the poem’s own experiments in form, structure, and idiom. Such innovations, however dazzling, are of only conditional value insofar as they do not issue from the roots and branches of a coherent metaphysical structure, but from its breakdown. Indeed, if The Waste Land is anything to go by, all that remains for the artist at this point is sifting through “a heap of broken images,” and seeking a new way of establishing continuity between them. Presumably, any attempt to invent new purpose will end up in the same position as the poem’s various characters: isolated and plagued by anxieties over their impermanence.

Eliot’s contemporaries could not miss this message, for in the first two decades of the 20th century, the same atmosphere of social and cultural unraveling which inspired The Waste Land had caused something to snap in the realm of artistic production. This was the heyday of movement-based art, with its multitude of “isms:” Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, Expressionism, Dadaism, Constructivism, Suprematism, and so on. These inter-disciplinary, avant-garde networks advanced not just new formal approaches but, more fundamentally, new and conflicting ideas about art’s purpose and value. Gone was the rigid art world of the late 19th century, in which a single curmudgeonly critic (John Ruskin) attacking a single painter (James Whistler) could produce a scandalous libel case.

Within these new milieus, art was being variously imagined as a vehicle for revolutionary politics, as a specialist branch of aesthetic experimentation and contemplation, as a celebration of technology, and as a channel for the unhindered (and often unhinged) expression of the individual psyche. Such divergence, moreover, was self-perpetuating, since it dramatically accelerated the withdrawal of the arts into a separate sphere of discourse, detached from culture at large. This only heightened the nagging uncertainty about what artistic products are actually for, and whether they had anything of real use or relevance to offer society – questions which in turn guaranteed a further profusion of answers.

Nor was Eliot a remote observer of these developments. Like so many authors of the period, he owed his breakthrough to Ezra Pound, the flamboyant and fanatical cultural broker who personally initiated a string of movements such as Imagism and Vorticism. In fact, Pound was so instrumental in crafting the iconic structure of The Waste Land that he should probably be credited as co-author. In the manuscript we see him stripping away any semblance of convention, with comments like “verse [i.e. traditional poetic form] not interesting enough as verse to warrant so much of it.”

But it is precisely The Waste Land’s unflinchingly avant-garde posture that makes its recognition of the crisis of artistic value so compelling. Eliot was disdainful of nostalgia; remember his earlier “Prufrock” was partly responsible for dragging poetry out of the corpse of Victorian romanticism. Moreover, as he pointed out in his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” artistic genealogies are always in a kind of flux, as each new addition forces a fresh perspective on what has gone before. Eliot simply acknowledged that the modern perspective was defined by a kind of radical disjuncture, and wanted to explore the implications of that. This meant confronting the insecurity inherent to the modern artist’s task of, as it were, inventing his own values.

Most forms of artistic production have been insulated from the full force of this dilemma by simple practicalities: novels, plays, music, film and architecture have limited materials to make use of and specific markets to target. I would argue these natural boundaries allow us to appreciate the creative freedom that modern culture has brought, without being too concerned that as a consequence, there is something arbitrary about the goals instantiated in any particular work. This is why the best illustration of The Waste Land’s insights can today be found in art galleries and magazines. Having been subject to ever-fewer conventional constraints and popular expectations, this expanding ragbag of purposes and practices has come to embody the profound uncertainties that entered culture a century ago.

Portraying A Nation: Germany 1919-33 (Review)

First published online by Apollo Magazine on 17 August 2017

Today we can’t help but see the Weimar Republic in terms of its tragic denouement: the rise of Hitler and all that followed. But for those living there, the present was already insecure, often brutal, and as the historian Eric Hobsbawm would later recall, ‘unbelievably exciting, sophisticated, intellectually and politically explosive’. And it demanded new forms of expression.

These included, most famously, the plays of Bertolt Brecht, German Expressionist film, Dada, cabaret, and Marlene Dietrich. But there was another tendency that emerged at this moment, just as revolutionary in its way. It was known loosely as the Neue Sachlichkeit, meaning ‘New Objectivity’ or ‘New Sobriety’. Artists under its sway aimed to understand their time through its people – staring the zeitgeist right in the face, as it were. And, as an impressive exhibition at Tate Liverpool shows, they’ve left us with a remarkable window on to the era too.

‘Portraying a Nation: Germany 1919–1933’ tells the story of the Weimar Republic through the work of just two artists: the photographer August Sander, and the painter and printmaker Otto Dix. It’s a fantastic one-two punch. Though very different in both medium and temperament, they shared a determination to seek out and represent every recess of German society, and thereby to expose some deeper truth.

The first half of the show is devoted to Sander’s astonishing photographic project, ‘People of the Twentieth Century’. Over four decades, Sander set out to document and classify the entire social structure, accumulating thousands of images. 140 of them are on show here. In stark focus, surrounded by the paraphernalia of their daily lives, the subjects gaze passively from the centre of each portrait. They have no names, only labels placing them in Sander’s taxonomy of ‘archetypes’. Descriptors such as ‘Village Schoolteacher’, ‘Working Class Mother’, and ‘Beggar’ are assigned to the categories ‘Classes and Professions’, ‘The Woman’, and ‘The Last People.’

Running alongside these photographs, which wind around three rooms, the curators have supplied a timeline of Weimar Germany. You suspect Sander would have approved, since this adds to the impression of mere individuals lost in the maelstrom of history. It’s doubtful, however, that this sangfroid brought the photographer any comfort when that history bore down on him. In 1933 his son Erich, a Communist, was sent to prison, where he would eventually die. At this point Sander’s portraits begin to feel despairingly muted, as they receive labels like ‘National Socialist’ and ‘Victim of Persecution’.

This brings us to the second half of the show: the paintings, drawings and etchings of Otto Dix. If Sander has given us all the background we could ask for, Dix now gives us the foreground, in vivid and often disturbing detail. His was a different sort of ‘objectivity’, an amoral fascination with the beauty and potential of a society in tumult. His mission, most stunningly expressed in his lurid, crystalline style of portraiture, was ‘to expose ugliness and life undiluted’.

As Susanne Meyer-Büser points out in the exhibition catalogue, Dix returned from the First World War as a man on the make and no doubt ambition played a part in his self-styling as ‘proletarian rebel and big-city dandy.’ At any rate, he soon made a name for himself as a nihilistic observer of the demi-monde, as shown by the titles of some etchings Dix sent to an art dealer in 1920: War Cripples, Match Dealer, Sex Murderer, Lady in the Café, Card Players, and Butcher Shop.

In the following years, this cast grew to include bourgeois patrons, intellectuals, and performers, as Dix began churning out his dazzling portraits. He was profoundly inspired by the Old Masters, reviving both their compositional style and painting techniques. This meant placing his subjects proudly in the front and centre of the picture plane, giving them a confrontational air. It also led to his method of ‘glazing,’ a practice involving layers of thin oil paint and tempera, which produced unparalleled lustre and immediacy.

This visual splendour, however, was always for Dix a means of gazing into the souls of his subjects. Whether capturing the woollen texture of a suit in his Portrait of the Photographer Hugo Erfurt with Dog (1926), or rendering, with a painfully delicate brush, each pubic hair of his Nude Girl on a Fur (1932), his paintings show a flair for characterisation that any novelist could admire.

It’s possible to see Sander and Dix as the yin and yang of European modernism in this period. Sander sought to understand the world by imposing order, Dix by flirting with chaos. Both remind us of an actor who we tend to forget is on the stage during these frantic episodes in history: the detached observer, committed only to showing things as they are. I should add that, with over 300 works and many metres of wall text, this exhibition is heavy going. But rarely will you see a period of turmoil and flux brought to life with such depth and lucidity.

Category Error: Hilma af Klint

This article was first published online by Apollo magazine on 15 March 2016

You could call it the ‘Van Gogh factor’ – the aura that clings to a distinctive artist who was unrecognised during their lifetime. There is romance in this, and a chance to feel we are setting the record straight. It is curatorial gold – something apparently confirmed by the praise heaped on the Serpentine’s new exhibition of work by Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862–1944), only the second in Britain to date.

Hilma af Klint was an impressionist landscape painter by profession, but is known today for creating a series of cosmically-inspired abstract works that predate the early experiments in non-representation by more famous ‘pioneers’ such as Wassily Kandinsky and Robert Delaunay. Unlike the long-suffering Van Gogh, af Klint kept these endeavours resolutely hidden. The artist extended a moratorium on exhibiting The Paintings for the Temple – her main body of abstract works – for 20 years after her death: the paintings were not actually shown until 1986.

It’s not hard to see why af Klint was reticent about her experimental side. Her works have a pagan intensity, symbolic and monumental, that can be simply baffling. This is the case with a series of paintings from 1907 known as The Ten Largest, which, as the title suggests, are enormous – three metres tall – and present crowded conflagrations of organic and geometric shapes against pastel backgrounds. Other works more explicitly reveal her background as an esoteric spiritualist, who conducted séances with other female artists and saw her work as a ‘commission’ from the ‘High Masters’ of another dimension. The 193 Paintings for the Temple, which come in series such as Primordial Chaos(1906–07) and Evolution (1908), were largely an attempt to outline her cosmology through an immense variety of symbols, from swans and doves to letters and colours.

The clandestine nature of af Klint’s work is a helpful get-out clause for a critic, since her eccentric style is more or less impossible to pin down with conventional vocabulary or value judgements. She strikes me as a wonderful colourist on occasion, although her paintings are often convoluted. But what is the point of saying even this? Like William Blake, af Klint was not answering to any worldly authority. All you can do is marvel at the energy.

There are pitfalls to bringing overlooked artists into the spotlight. They tend to be remade in the image of our present desires; appropriated for political ends, caricatured with phrases like ‘rebel par excellence’. The Serpentine has admirably avoided this with a measured collection of essays. Here we learn, for instance, that some of the more famous abstract painters were also interested in spiritualism, that af Klint herself was equally interested in science, and that Sweden was – comparatively speaking – accepting of female artists during her lifetime.

Ultimately, though, the greatest value of art-historical anomalies like af Klint does not stem from their elusiveness, nor from their canon-defying dates (already I see people claiming that Georgiana Houghton, whose work goes on show at the Courtauld later this year, predates af Klint in the abstraction stakes). It is that their work tends to make us abandon the generic lenses we habitually apply to art. To call af Klint abstract, for instance, is a category error, since she was independent of this discourse. Such perspective must be a good thing, even if it leaves us without much to say.

Jo Spence: The Final Project

This article was first published online by Wallpaper* on Feb 15 2016

‘The Final Project’ is a great title, capturing the unsettling combination of humour and honesty with which photographer Jo Spence (1934–1992), with her long-term collaborator Terry Dennett, documented her death from leukemia over two years in 1991–92. As a selection now being shown at London’s Richard Saltoun gallery demonstrates, the scope of the project was unflinching and ambitious – testament to an artist with nothing to lose.

‘The Final Project’ has a few different strands, which echo both the deterioration of Spence’s health and the stages of emotional trauma. An early part involved photographing comical assemblages in a graveyard, including joke-shop skeletons, flowers and bushy blond wigs, recalling the adage that sometimes the only response to tragedy one can muster is laughter.

 In another equally mischievous, though more analytical series, the feminist Spence contrasted Western obsessions with beauty and youth with the celebration of death in Mexican and Egyptian traditions. And finally, as she grew weaker, Spence fell back on the prodigious archive of images she had amassed during her career, and created new works by overlaying them in a technique called ‘slide-sandwiching’.

These beautiful montages, with Spence’s body floating above a stream or a field, have a serene atmosphere of acceptance. Using older images of herself was also a way around what Spence called her ‘crisis of representation’, whereby she felt her emaciated body to be totally estranged from her spirit. Ultimately, though, she overcame this challenge as well. In a series of self-portraits from her deathbed, she manages with a peaceful stare to confound mortality itself.

George Grosz and the Necessity of Offence

This article was first published online by Prospect magazine on 23 Sept 2013

Berlin during the 1920s is often seen as an oasis for libertines, glittering between two authoritarian periods: the Wilhelmine Reich, with its bloody culmination in the First World War, and the rise of the Nazis. The era is kept alive by enduring images of political assassinations and barricades, the banknote-littered streets of hyperinflation, transvestism and open displays of homosexuality. Brecht was at the theatre, Dietrich in the cinema, Dada in the galleries, and WH Auden chasing rough trade in the bars. Nowhere did the Twenties roar so dementedly as in Berlin, the city struggling to find both a stable identity and enough food to eat. Continue reading George Grosz and the Necessity of Offence

Carol Bove: Between Art and Design

This article was first published online by Apollo Magazine on 23 Apr 2015

Carol Bove’s work is curious in that it seems to inhabit two worlds at once. Her careful arrangements of sculptures and found objects cry out to be interpreted as conceptual art. Yet, aesthetically speaking, the objects themselves have much in common with contemporary design.

Bove uses the same components again and again – small structures of brass cubes and concrete, driftwood bolted to I-beams, peacock feathers, hanging metal nets, giant ‘noodles’ of curling steel with a polished white finish. These, along with some original additions, are all involved in her latest exhibition, ‘The Plastic Unit’, which occupies five rooms at David Zwirner in London. Each of these objects has its own minimalist, tactile charm, but displaying them together in a gallery also poses the question of how they relate to one another.

At the show’s opening, Bove herself suggested there are two ways to approach her work: a ‘gestalt’ (or formal) approach, and a ‘psychedelic’ one. The latter she describes as ‘bridging the membrane into the subjective experience’ – or put more simply, ‘you can get lost in it’.

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Carol Bove, I, quartz pyx, who fling muck beds (2015), Concrete and brass. © the artist, courtesy of David Zwirner, New York/London

The gallery space is crafted to suggest the interaction of objects. You’re invited to look through them at other objects, or past them into another room. Bove is a ventriloquist, using her components to assume different voices from visual culture – the ornamental, the industrial, bric-a-brac, the artefact – and contrasting them with each other. Her detached, almost scientific placement of the objects rather cleverly gives them the aura of a museum display, or a show room for cars or antiques.

Bove’s work implies that it is meaningful, and moreover can be imbued with all manner of meaning, but it never goes so far as to confirm or deny anything in particular. I suspect this relaxed ambiguity is a reason why Bove’s short career has been packed with impressive solo exhibitions. While her work acts as a lightning rod for the aggressive interpretations of an art world audience, it also makes no demand of the viewer who would rather read nothing between the lines, and merely enjoy the strange buzz of these objects-turned-artefacts or commodities. In other words, the conceptual part of Bove’s work is optional.

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Carol Bove, detail from Mussel Shell (2014), Peacock feather, seashell, found steel object, concrete, and brass. © the artist, courtesy of David Zwirner, New York/London

This can be seen as part of Bove’s ongoing interest in context, for the obvious conclusion must be that conceptual depth stems purely from her work’s gallery setting. If Marcel Duchamp’s famous breakthrough was to show that anything placed in a gallery is art, Bove’s response is to show that contemporary art now depends on the gallery for its very existence.

What makes the dualism of Bove’s work all the more apparent is that her objects so easily slide into the category of interior design. That this is little commented on is perhaps a reflection of how deftly Bove uses the implications of the gallery space. Yet, her angular brass frames and knotted dark wood sculptures would look entirely at home in the window of Andrew Martin or the Conran Shop. This connection is made explicit by another exhibition currently taking place at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, which puts Bove alongside legendary architect and designer Carlo Scarpa. The aesthetic similarities are uncanny (though according to Bove, coincidental).

The traditional boundary between art and design is functionality. Designers like Carlo Scarpa, who shared Bove’s interest in the psychic life of objects and space, test that boundary. Bove does the same from the other side: with her knack for exposing the mechanics of interpretation and display, it is not unreasonable to think of her as a designer whose function is to provide contemporary art exhibitions.

Installation view from the 2015 solo exhibition ‘Carol Bove: The Plastic Unit’ at David Zwirner, London. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London
Carol Bove, Self Talk (2015), installation view from the 2015 solo exhibition ‘Carol Bove: The Plastic Unit’ at David Zwirner, London. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London

Tom Wesselmann: Collages

This article was first published online by Apollo magazine on Feb 3 2016

To think of American Pop Art, for most, is to think of Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein. Their catchy and, for some, bland idioms have made them an irresistible crutch for documentary makers and art teachers. But in the shadow of these looming figures can be found a rich undergrowth of art which deserves attention.

To that end ‘Tom Wesselmann: Collages’, now on show at David Zwirner, is a good place to start. Wesselmann (1931–2004), together with James Rosenquist and Jim Dine, represents a side of Pop Art more sensual – and more thoughtful – than Campbell’s soup cans and Marilyns. This much is already evident in Wesselmann’s collages, intimate works made in the late 1950s and early 60s.

These have been neatly divided into three rooms at David Zwirner in London. First is a series he titled ‘Portrait Collages’ miniature interior scenes each occupied by a figure crudely drawn in pastel and surrounded by various scraps and cuttings: a square of wallpaper, a leaf signifying a tree behind the window. These works have the naivety and exuberance of a child’s scrapbook and if, like me, you have a soft spot for that sort of thing, these collages alone are worth the trip.

Next are the equally tiny collages known generically as nudes, although these were constructed around sketches of real models, some of who are mentioned in the titles. They are closely modelled on classical Renaissance compositions or, in some instances, such as the odalisque Blue Nude (1959), on Wesselmann’s lifelong inspiration Matisse.

The upper part of the gallery is devoted to a few bold, large-scale works that grew from the smaller studies. Little Great American Nude #1(1961) was the first of the long series that would make Wesselmann’s name. By this time, in the early 1960s, Wesselmann was contacting advertisers directly to get his hands on billboard posters. He combined parts of these, such as the shiny two-foot-high apple of Still Life #29, with painted elements and bright backgrounds in humorous but disarmingly complex arrangements.

With these collages Wesselmann was feeling his way past the Abstract Expressionism that had dominated the 1950s. Like the other nascent Pop artists (of whom he was still unaware), he sought inspiration from the rampant, giddy consumer-culture blooming around him. But what made Wesselmann more interesting many of his contemporaries was the way in which he reached back through art history, treating the imagery of pop culture as a continuation of, rather than a break with, the past.

Wesselmann’s work, especially concerning the female form, was uniquely warm and voluptuous compared to most Pop Art, as it sought out the element of desire that flowed from the Renaissance nude right through to the advertising billboard. His detached view of pop imagery meant he was able to analyse it coolly and expose it as just another system of signs.

Wesselmann was uneasy with the Pop label from the beginning, and these sensitive collages make the association seem more like a burden. At this stage it would be better to compare to the enigmatic and curious Jasper Johns, a bemused observer of American life.

Christian Rosa’s Rube Goldberg Machine

This article was first published online by Apollo Magazine on 2 Apr 2015

For a new generation of abstract painters, the process of making an artwork often becomes an indispensable part of showing the work as well. Within the gallery/art fair/website complex, paintings can be accompanied by interesting back-stories, or at least a series of words – such as ‘discovery’, ‘exploration’, or ‘deconstruction’ – which keep the figure of the bold and exciting artist close to the painting they’ve made.

In the case of Christian Rosa, however, it seems more than reasonable to draw attention to his process in this way, because it is vividly manifest in his work. In his latest show, ‘Put your Eye in your Mouth’ at White Cube Mason’s Yard, abstract pictorial characters interact freely within large canvases. The process they reveal is similar to jazz improvisation: composition is discarded and each new note (or element in the painting) is a response to what has come before it, and likewise must be accommodated by what follows it. There are no mistakes, only adjustments and problems to solve. Filling the canvas is not a means to an end but an end in itself.

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Installation shot of Christian Rosa’s exhibition, Put Your Eye in Your Mouth, at White Cube Mason’s Yard, March 2015. © White Cube and the artist

The result is a sense of kinetic energy, and of things unfolding. Kathy Grayson has aptly compared Rosa’s work to a Rube Goldberg machine, and you are indeed invited to follow an imaginary ball as it twists through coiled pencil lines, bounces between dashes of electrical tape, and drops from boxes to be deposited in pools of impasto oil paint. When you come to a painting, there is an interesting moment when everything is in flux, and your eye can dance along a range of different sequences and relationships. The canvas is an imaginative space where the restrictions of logic and familiarity are briefly suspended.

The paintings can unfold in the way due to the suggestive nature of Rosa’s pictorial language, which, though abstract, approaches meaning or even symbolism. The artist’s trick is to avoid representation, yet come close enough to it to activate the viewer’s instinct to decipher an image. Thus is, of course, an old modernist recipe, used to great effect by abstract artists such as Paul Klee, Antoni Tàpies and Cy Twombly (on whose influence Rosa is outspoken). The essential element is that of drawing – a hand rendered quality that invokes a human voice trying, on some level, to communicate.

But most critics have been weary of comparing Rosa and his contemporaries – such Rebecca Morris, Joe Bradley and David Ostrowski – to this older abstract tradition, known for its conviction and spiritual depth. Advocates of the contemporary works emphasise their playfulness and improvisation, with terms like ‘casualism’ and ‘provisional painting.’ But this has inevitably invited more caustic labels such as ‘slacker abstraction’ or ‘zombie formalism’. In a piece for the March issue of Frieze, David Geers accuses Rosa of outright nostalgia.

Latent in these tags, I think, is the criticism that painters like Rosa are borrowing the fashions of the past without demonstrating any of that daring and commitment which originally characterised them. What this means in the language of contemporary art is that the work is not subversive enough; it is too consumer friendly, and thus devoid of substance.

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Installation shot of Christian Rosa’s exhibition, Put Your Eye in Your Mouth, at White Cube Mason’s Yard, March 2015. © White Cube and the artist

But subversion is not Rosa’s aim, and it must be said that the energy and curiosity of his work, though fleeting, leaves this criteria itself feeling nostalgic and more than a little institutionalised. Indeed, there is an element of the famous Whistler v. Ruskin dispute in these criticisms of current abstract painters – a sense of resentment towards the market for celebrating work that has not taken long enough to paint.

Moreover, Rosa has updated pictorial abstraction. One of his most consistent elements is, unmistakably, the screen – screens everywhere, in different sizes, colours and textures. The way that elements float on his canvases implies the moveability of icons on a desktop, and their arrangement in front of and behind each other mimics the indeterminate digital space, at once flat and infinitely deep. There is even room, in his exploration of the way autonomous objects can connect, to interpret a more profound evocation of modern life.

At the exhibition opening, all this was rather epitomised by Rosa himself, absent-mindedly wandering around the room looking at his phone. Process and its inherent sense of personality are prominent in Rosa’s work, and this is just the art you might expect from a skater in a Where’s Wally hat who paints with his friends in a Los Angeles warehouse, and dispenses corny phrases like ‘New York is dead,’ and ‘I never chose painting, it chose me.’ Both he and his work embody an unassuming, satisfied and nonchalant strand of creative culture. Whether you like or loathe him probably reflects how you feel about that culture.