Who buys a snow-globe with a teddy bear Madonna and teddy bear child inside with an Xmas theme? Buying inappropriate gifts is part of the festive consumer season; who hasn’t received one or more? This one was given anonymously as a Kris Kringle gift so we don’t know who bought it. It failed so completely as a gift that it was immediately traded for chocolate. It is the very definition of kitsch by Clement Greenberg on nitro. The snow globe is a translation of a high art, a Madonna and child, into two inappropriate media – teddy bears and snow globes. This snow-globe was obviously designed by someone who was only vaguely familiar with Xmas and Christian symbolism – why do the teddy bears have wings? It does explain the old saying: it is better to give than to receive. It is better to give this stuff than to receive it.

Photographed by Richard.

            This past week Luc Tuymans was interviewed by T. J. Clark at the Wexner. It was refreshing to witness an artist/critic conversation not inhibited by art. Mr. Tuymans ranged over history, family, politics, personal likes and dislikes, all in reference to his work. What’s an artist/critic conversation inhibited by art? It is the legacy of Clement Greenberg lurking in the shadows. It is the need to be “art specific” in the sense that Greenberg stressed being “medium specific.” When a conversation with an artist stays centered on art history, the evolution of the artist’s work from that of the work of others that preceded the artist, its relationship to other “like” artwork (the spontaneous generation of genre), and the instantiation of theory within that artist’s repertoire, then you know the conversation is being inhibited by art. Some of Clark’s segues were specific in promoting his own agenda of interpreting Tuymans’ work. Luc Tuymans was very generous in allowing these but also did not oblige Clark with any commitment to Clark’s personal perspective.

            This week Mermaid Hawley emailed updates on the ongoing melodrama of Coney Island and its temporary reprieve. It made me think of the chorus line from the John Prine song Paradise. I had forgotten about this singer/songwriter. How did that happen?  Listening again to his early songs I found the lyrics still relevant, pertinent, and cutting. Prine was a contemporary of Dylan and equally prodigious. I’m certain when the awards for relics are given out at the Kennedy Center it will go to Bob and not John. That is understandable as awards always reflect the values of those passing them out. Dylan’s early lyrics always embodied some form of control, some form of potency and power. A child of the decline of colonialism, his early songs always had someone, be it a deus ex machina, a protagonist or antagonist, or just a “they,” that had the power or control of a situation. There is always a sense that the “reason” for how things have become or turned out the way they are, can be found or determined (though it is not readily available or apparent). If it can be known and articulated, if it can be named, then it can be defined. By defining it, it becomes ours, we reassert our control (though the actual situation has not changed in the least). Prine’s songs embody being caught up in things that have no explanation; it just turns out to be that way (“that’s the way that the world goes round”). Prine’s antagonists/protagonists, the many various characters who inhabit his poetic “-scapes” are not in control, have no power to effect any substantial change. They are more like Shakespearean actors who have their moment to strut their stuff on the stage, simply playing out their roles without any determination or understanding of the greater whole. Dylan’s early work appealed to “intellectuals” because it spoke of the greater environment and understanding of the universe or cosmos at large that a thinking being found itself immersed in, a universe that was named and defined. A closer analysis reveals that it was more an appeal to the privilege and power of intellect/intellectuals as an expression of bourgeoisie culture at the tail end of colonialism. The need to “sum it up,” to understand it all is prevalent throughout (there’s always a master narrative lurking in the margins). The existence of some power that exercises its dominance and influence is of the utmost priority. Even more important is the need to “believe” that there is an explanation for what is going on, even if the individual doesn’t possess it; that somehow it can be understood, that power can be exerted to effect an outcome. This need for control is absent with Prine’s early work where the subject is caught up in things, even before they become a subject. Dylan receives awards, while Prine’s work will most likely become like his subjects- part of the history of what is integral to the making of everyday life but lost in the need to take that history for granted, not call attention to it for the sake of maintaining a hierarchy of control and dominance.

A response to an Aesthetics class I took last semester with Stephen White. Clement Greenberg’s article “The Avant-Garde and Kitsch” upset me. So I wrote a comic.

The empahasis on the form, with context, background and meaning taking secondary importance.

Was important in putting abstract art where it is; Clement Greenberg, art critic, was said to have said that form was the purest art of all, it gave huge oppurtunities to the American painters but unfortunately made sculpture a bit of a second class citizen.

Plato was seen to have started formalism, he saw work as a combination of forms (elements) which make an imitation to real life.

Clive Bell -aesthetician of formalism and a member of the Bloomsbury Group

Formalism is the idea that everything that is needed is in the piece of artwork, prior knowledge of context is irrelevant to the artwork. I see formalism as a crucial part to minmalism. Many of Sol Lewitt’s works are what I consider to be formalism, but Donald Judd, Eva Hesse and Dan Flavin. However it is seen that formalism was around much earlier, maybe emerging after the confusion of Impressionism. Paul Cezanne can be seen to be a formalist, painting with vivid brushstrokes which were interesting to view. Him and the other post-impressionists sort of developed into formalism. The Bloomsbury Group in England organised an exhibit of the works of post impressionists and Manet and essentially introduced Britain to what was happening across the channel. I see this as quite a crucial point in the development of British Art.

Donald Judd

Eva Hesse

Dan Flavin

Sol Lewitt

Also I really liked this one, kinda reminds me of Matt’s piece where he discussed the art of road painting

"Minimalism is born from a lack of passion for the things we do"

So I’m happy with that, makes me feel a little better about art in general.

What is kitsch and why did Clement Greenberg, the most influential art critic of the 1950s and ‘60s, consider it a bad thing?   This and related questions will be under discussion today in Professor Marian Hollinger’s class,  Art History 1950 & After.   Greenberg actually published his essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” in 1939, but any understanding of aesthetical issues after 1950 must begin with this essay, which laid the groundwork for virtually all of the art criticism to follow for the next quarter century.

What distinguishes avant-garde from kitsch? Put as simply as possible, it is the difference between “high art” and “low art”. On the level of aesthetical principle, the difference, according to Greenberg, is that avant-garde “imitates the process of art”, while kitsch only imitates its effects.

If that distinction is not immediately clear, consider it from a different angle: avant-garde is authentic, original, “hand-made”;  kitsch is bogus, parasitic, mass-produced. Avant-garde is rare, one-of-a-kind, created by individual genius;  kitsch is commonplace, repetitive, churned out, as it were, by machines.  Avant-garde is recondite, subtle, difficult;  kitsch is obvious, pre-digested, easy.  Avant-garde resists simple interpretation and is difficult to manipulate;  kitsch is easily turned to propaganda and commercial exploitation.  Avant-garde renews and preserves the cultural life of a society;  kitsch undermines and erodes it.

Neither “avant-garde” nor “kitsch”, as concepts, were original with Greenberg.  The avant-garde, as a movement in the arts, had been in existence for nearly a century at the time of Greenberg’s essay, while “kitsch”, as an idea, had originated with the German intellectual Left.  But Greenberg was the first to place the avant-garde in its historical context and to establish its cultural importance.  He identified avant-garde and kitsch as the twin antipodes of modernism and dated their simultaneous appearance to the early stages of industrial capitalism.

Greenberg’s influence during the 1950s and early ‘60s was immense.  More than any other critic he was responsible for the dominance of Abstract Expressionism, the shift of the Western art world from Paris to New York, and the unprecedented influence of theory over the artists themselves. Yet Greenberg’s insistence on the divide between avant-garde and kitsch, between high art and low art, was not to last.  With the appearance of Pop Art and the rise of Warhol, avant-garde and kitsch collapsed into one another and became all but indistinguishable.  And thus was post-modernism born.

Exciting times! – with many a battle won and lost in galleries and garrets, and with nothing less, according to many, than the fate of Western culture at stake.  And how did it turn out?  Is Western culture still with us?  Well, bone up on your art history, visit the museums and galleries, then look around and decide for yourself.

The Last Bastion of Strength?

Arcadian Paisley woke up with a start. The sixteen year old had been having some fitful nights of sleep lately, filled with strange dreams about art museums in the city closing down and gallery directors throwing themselves out of windows, turning into blobs of flesh, bone and blood like canvases from his favorite British painter Francis Bacon.

His darkened bedroom walls, lit with a strange glow from his KLH series 9700 virtual robot music system, displayed several of his own paintings done in art classes at Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan.  Just today, he recalled in a groggy half-awakened state, his principal had announced that due to budget cuts, art classes across all public and private high schools in the city would cease, and in their place students could sign on for robotic engineering and drone vehicle battery design.

In the year 2036, with the noxious air of Manhattan demanding constant filtering from overhead floating drone aircraft, the world of art had been in steady decline since the banking crisis almost three decades earlier in 2007.  Arcadian’s father, Paul, an abstract expressionist painter, had committed suicide a year earlier, a few days after the boy’s fifteenth birthday.  If it hadn’t been for a generous trust fund left by his grandfather, who invented AcrylOil, a revolutionary, non-polluting green technology painting medium that became mandated by the government in 2025, Arcadian’s mother Shelly would have been unable to pay the soaring property taxes and operating expense of the family’s palatial brownstone on East 77^th Street.

The boy’s recurring dreams had begun to take their toll, filtering between the horrors of finding his father slumped over his painting easel, a fatal gunshot wound to his temple, and the disintegration of the art world, with artists entering asylums and being treated with lasershock, a so-called benign solution to manage an epidemic of depressed artists across the world.

Arcadian had recently been having trouble staying awake during his classes, and was given to day-dreaming about a flurry of recent events in New York City that affected his love affair with the arts, one that went back to early childhood when he would watch his father working in his painting studio from his playroom.  He realized from the age of three he had wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a painter, but even then, the world of traditional art, with its majestic public galleries and museums and infrastructure of private collectors and art critics, had already begun to disintegrate.

One of the earliest events the boy recalled was his father loudly complaining at the dinner table about the Etsey-Art Corporation, a monolithic enterprise that had pioneered the sale of artwork on the internet at the beginning of the century,  and had begun to buy up private galleries in the city and shutter their doors.  Their infamous motto, he remembered, was “If you’re an artist, you don’t need a gallery!”  The strategy had worked slowly at first, but as more and more artists signed on for their virtual services, gallery owners, auction houses and other art venue owners took notice.

Over the span of a few short years, EAC, with the traditionalists in the art world referring to it as “Easy as Crap”, became a multi-billion dollar powerhouse, and with its financial prowess, began its “seek and destroy” campaign of putting art galleries in Manhattan, Los Angeles, and other cities out of business. Their charter was simply to drive every artist in the world to display their artwork in their virtual art gallery website, and to drive every individual in the world interested in art, to purchase or otherwise, to the same venue.  EAC wanted to absolutely control all artists in the world and to control them and their customers, it was a master plan and with their financial power, their plan began to take shape.

Around the same period, as part and parcel of their master plan to control the art market, EAC began to influence the power bases at art journals and those of critics that could make or break an artist’s career.

EAC knew their business, and wanted to be able to control the power of pioneering critics like Clement Greenberg, who with a dash of his pen or dropping of a name at a Manhattan dinner party could launch an artist’s career into orbit.  And so systematically, they began to buy up and control the editorial content and reviews that appeared in journals like Art in America, with a devastating effect on both individual artists’ careers and the public’s interests at large in patronizing real-world art venues.

Lying in bed, Arcadian recalled with sadness when EAC had several years earlier began a systematic destruction of his father Paul’s career, because he had become an outspoken public critic of Etsey-Art’s methods of selling art on the internet by becoming an all-powerful monopoly.  With pride he remembered a public debate at a Town Hall meeting when his father had faced off with the CEO of EAC, and called him the “architect of doom” as the champion of a movement to destroy every public access to art and culture.

The war between EAC and his father reached a tipping point when the gallery where Paul had exhibited for more than twenty years on the lower east side, where in fact his painting career had been launched, was bought by the giant corporation and almost overnight, shuttered.  The power of his adversary was emphasized during that time when EAC subsequently closed down two dozen neighboring art galleries in an area of Alphabet City that many were hoping would become the “New Chelsea”, which had gone into decline and vanished around 2015 when the world art market had entered a new down-leg in its spiritual and financial collapse.

Upon the closing of his father’s gallery, the news hit hard, but no one at the time suspected how hard.  His mother Sally and Arcadian’s lives would be changed forevermore the night when the fatal shot rang out from the revolver in Paul’s studio, a single shot and then eerie silence.

Arcadian remembered the solemn funeral on Long Island, near East Hampton where his father had grown up on his grandfather’s estate, another artist and chemist who pioneered the breakthrough paint that changed how artists would work and create.  AcrylOil, born in his grandfather’s laboratory, a converted greenhouse on the rambling seaside lawns, addressed the demands of the government in 2024 that all commercially available products, including those used by artists, must meet a stringent non-polluting mandate, or be banned from the market.

At the funeral, the critics, gallery directors, patrons and collectors and other friends of his father paid their respects, and their sadness was palpable as they embraced him and his mother.  Arcadian remembered it felt not only like the passing of his father, who was his hero and his reason for wanting to be an artist, but also like the passing of a generation of artistic and cultural icons whose importance was now mired in the past.

Arcadian’s eyes passed over the panels of georock that covered the ceiling of his bedroom, its plastic luminosity shimmering as dawn began to creep in through his windows facing East 77^th Street. The boy wondered if and when the nightmares would stop, filled with feelings of anxiety that the world of art that he, his father and grandfather knew would soon vanish forever.

He pondered, with the cool cotton of his pillowcase resting against his cheek, how an unstoppable force like Etsey-Art could be overturned, how the millions of artists all over the world could be convinced, as could the art patrons, collectors, and buyers that seeing art on the internet, on an Ultraplasma one-hundred ninety-inch wall display, is not the same experience as seeing a canvas hung on a wall in a gallery.  That argument, once a topic of debate, had with the sheer financial prowess of Etsey-Art, and by its unstoppable power and might, been silenced forever.

EAC had, of its own volition, changed the way that artworks were viewed and purchased, at a societal level.  They had forged their battle against the museums, galleries, auction houses and art critics of the world, and they had won.

For Arcadian Paisley, the final straw had been his father’s suicide, when he had no choice but to accept that the great traditions of art, the hallowed halls of museums where the public once flocked and their brethren institutions, the art galleries large and small that flanked Manhattan neighborhoods, and the feeling of family and connection with all of them was now lost forever.

The last bastion of strength, the lone holdout institution that held its ground, had been The Museum of Modern Art.  Although struggling financially and in desperate need of a financial white knight, MOMA had kept its doors open, vowing that it would survive EAC’s onslaught to close down all avenues to viewing art except its own.

As he got ready for school, jumping into his InstantShower, a mandated city technology that made use of biochemical enzymes to purify the body instead of using water, which the city had in reserve only for emergency use in hospitals as of two years earlier, Arcadian reasoned that with a strong holdout institution like MOMA, that there might be hope for a counter-revolution, begun by his father, to overturn the power and monopoly over the art world held by Etsey-Art Corporation.

Arcadian usually beat his mother Sally down the winding staircase of their townhouse in the mornings, and this one was no exception.

As the boy entered the expansive marble walled kitchen on the first floor, the KLH Ultraplasma one-hundred ninety-inch display integrated into the far wall came to life.  A low and husky woman’s voice whispered from overhead speakers, “Where can I take you?”

Arcadian blurted out “New York Times, front page”.  The massive panoramic screen suddenly became alive with color and images, the venerable logo of the only remaining news organization on the east coast appearing and then fading into black.

The next screen that appeared, one that Arcadian Paisley would never forget, was a banner headline that stretched across the entire width of the virtual newspaper in pixelated horror.

It read simply, in bolded typeface “ETSEY-ART CORPORATION PURCHASES MUSEUM OF MODERN ART FOR ITS WORLD HEADQUARTERS”.

Duchamp, Manzoni, Lewitt, Craig-Martin, Gilbert and George

Conceptual art, an art form which established itself in the 1960s but saw its roots back in the early twentieth century with the dada movement and Marcel Duchamp. But why did it take so long for the movement to come to complete fruition? Easy answer, the timing was not right. The artists who moved to the states from Europe in an attempt to flee World War One were interrupted by a new wave of artists who fled Europe from World War Two. With this came the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art. Both of these were very important in the creation of a movement that would change the art world forever. After world war two, America was in a state of feeling victorious and powerful over the world, of course it was the beginning of a new world power. With this confidence grew a thriving for more knowledge and a desire to enhance the nation that had done so well in the two previous wars. All cultural activities were to delight in more money being spent on their development, and the critic world which we know today was born. One critic, Clement Greenberg was so influential he split the art world, dividing it into its medium genres. Painting being dominant at the time was given much more attention than the less popular sculpture. Because of this, painting became incredibly self-reflective and self-referential. It formed into a formal action, mainly counting on its aesthetic value to get it any publicity.

           At the same time a group of artists was forming under the term fluxus. These artists were not interested in the traditional ways of expressing oneself but were into more unconventional methods such as dance, performance art, music amongst others. Although these had been seen before, never had they been considered art in a gallery format. With this came the questioning of the purpose of the gallery and a wish to break away and elude the art market. Conceptual art was born. The artists were not first interested in making paintings but decided on whatever materials and form was appropriate to the concept. This overcoming of medium and the task of putting the idea first is the origin of conceptual art. Although the art was growing in popularity around the early sixties, the term wasn’t coined until Sol Lewitt wrote “Paragraphs on conceptual art” were he explains the type of art he was generating. This was published in the June, 1967 edition of ArtForum Magazine, a significant international art magazine still around today.

           So let’s begin with Marcel Duchamp, who can be considered as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. His controversial work and stunning concepts behind the work took the art scene by storm and turned it upside down, he raised questions about the aesthetics of art, the importance of the craftsmanship of the artist, the idea that the artist did not even need to make the work and maybe the most important of all he questioned what is art? What was its purpose in modern day society?

            Marcel Duchamp was born in 1887 into an incredibly creative family. His older brothers were to become famous artists themselves; the sculptor, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and painter, Jacques Villon. At an early age, Duchamp worked in a fauvist style, being inspired by painters such as Andre Derain and Matisse but eventually moved onto a more cubist approach. His depiction of cubism was very different to the other examples of work under the movement’s umbrella, it concentrated mostly on time, similar to a long exposure of a camera setting. In his selection of works, “Nude descending a staircase” is perhaps the most well-known, having a great composition, backed up by the strong, confident use of line and colour. This was seen as a step in the wrong direction for cubism and was rejected by the community. Duchamp was of course disheartened, but did not give up on art. In fact, this can be seen as the most important turning point in his work.   

           The artist began to produce ready-mades as artwork, found objects which formed the basis for the dada movement. The union of objects and the juxtaposition of them against one another is a reaction to the First World War, a form of protest art, and also something that rebelled against the boundaries of art. In some respects it can be seen as anti-art in its concept. This can be seen as an attempt to react against the society which did not agree with his earlier work and which had settled neatly into a predictable cubist world. In 1915 he moved to New York along with other artists who were both fleeing the war and this conventional groove. Possibly the most famous of his readymades was constructed during his time in New York.

           In 1917, an artwork which was certainly never appreciated at the time and caused controversy throughout the art scene, Fountain was entered into an exhibition showcasing the avant-garde of new work in the New York area. It was discarded and disallowed by the panel, pushing Duchamp and his companions out of the increasingly popular art world. This piece is, without a doubt, one of the most significant pieces of art not only in the twentieth century, but ever. It paved the road for the legacy of Duchamp, who soon became one of the most respected artists in New York. Duchamp and his close friend Man Ray wrote New York Dada, a compendium and manifesto to what the movement meant, which was hugely influential to artists at the time, and many artists flocked to the new epicentre of art. Amidst the prowess and thriving art scene in the states, Duchamp focussed on what he considers his most important work “The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)” which he worked on for eight years, and then his final twenty years were spent working on a 3-dimensional version of the piece. It is so incredibly important because of its connection to the artist. Just imagine how much effort the artist put into the work. Duchamp overlooked this point though as it was unimportant to the final piece, instead he centred on the concept behind the art. The bride is isolated from the nine bachelors in the bottom screen, this can be interpreted as two things, one they are working for her, attempting to please her, this would mean it’s a satirical work were the female has complete power over the male gender. The second is that it is a kind of experiment, the removal of women from the world could lead to disastrous consequences, as males would have nothing to work for. Either way, the piece is without doubt strong. I believe the artist’s choice to think of this as his most vital work to be because of his connection with it and the effect and control the work had on his life (it did take him 28 years).

           In all of his works, including the early works, he has asked the question what is art? He has questioned how art is viewed and how artists should approach making their artworks. Duchamp was the key player in the evolution of art towards its conceptual climax in the 1960s. He died in 1968 just outside Paris.

Continuing on from Duchamp’s idea, Piero Manzoni is an infamous artist who dealt with the growing celebrity trend by creating mass-produced items inspired by himself. He was born in Italy in 1933 and started working in white monochrome paintings during the early 1950s influence by Yves Klein’s work in the same way, but eventually moved on to what he is considered to be so important for. “Artist’s Shit” talks about the artists role in the art world, dealing with the artist itself. It portrayed the art to be a futile act which was nowhere near as imperative as the artist. The tin was simple with the label reading “Artist’s shit,” the simplicity being crucial to the audiences understanding of the concept, the brutal wording emphasising the vulgarity of the work. This piece was a follow up to the successful “Artist’s breath” a balloon blown up by the artist. It, of course, has the same concept as the offensive tin. Jars of Angelina Jolie’s and Brad Pitt’s breath were recently sold in 2005 for $15099 on ebay. Maybe Manzoni was warning us of this impending celebrity obsessed culture we live in today. It also may have been a precursor for the skyrocketing art market in the nineties with art collectors such as Saatchi buying piece just for the sake of owning a piece by an important artist. He became a member of Milan’s Galeria Azimut, a meeting place for avant-garde artists which provided the art scenes daily dose of provocative and controversial works. The mundane becoming very valuable is a theme seen in the work of the Dadaists and Duchamp.

           Although Manzoni was inspired by the past, he was fascinated with developing art and worked mostly in the sixties to form a base for the rest of conceptual art to bounce off of. Works such as his living sculptures piece, allowed the viewer to step on and become art. This was obviously a huge inspiration to Gilbert and George, who describe themselves as living sculptures. The artist was early on the art scene and unfortunately died before Sol Lewitt published his paragraphs on conceptual art, but yet he is still considered a conceptual artist. Why? Because of his clever use of humour in his works, his aspiration to break the boundaries between art genres, and of course his strong clear concepts. Mazoni died in 1963, and had created a ledge were other artists could continue his legacy.

           Sol Lewitt, one of these artists which used Manzoni’s work as a grounding, was born in Connecticut, 1928. He worked as a graphic artist for, a now internationally renowned architect, I.M.Pei. As a young boy he was inspired by De Stijl and Bauhaus, influenced by its straight lines and design purpose. His earlier works were mostly of cubes organized in a structural arrangement until he saw the potential for furthering his art and moving into the conceptual world. He made up serial systems which provided ideas for his work, it systematically worked through all the outcomes with the inputs provided. This is especially true for “49 Three-Part Variations on Three Different Kinds of Cubes,” where he experimented with three different kinds of cube (open, closed, and half open) and found how many variations he could create with this. He published his findings of this new kind of art in his paragraphs on conceptual art in ArtForum, 1967:

 “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”

           This extract resembles very closely how Lewitt worked with his art, he was extremely isolated from it. This involved even getting other people to produce his work for him, while he wrote the plans. This was particularly evident in his wall drawings phase where Lewitt would compose a set of instructions and give them to a draughtsman who would then follow the plans to his best of knowledge and thus the artwork would be created. This ingenious form of working allowed Lewitt to produce vast amounts of clever systematic pieces, which like his work before used a logical pattern to attain its final state. This serial method may have been inspired by the repetition of tanks and soldiers from the Vietnam war and the mass produced objects in the consumerist market that existed at the time. Pop artists such as Andy Warhol had already looked into this, much like Manet had done during the late nineteenth century, and now Lewitt was, but in a much more conceptual way, obscuring it beyond the obvious. Lewitt worked from the late sixties into the modern day with large concrete structures resembling his earlier work. However he died recently in April 2007. He was extremely important in the expansion of conceptual art, not just for his findings but how he highlighted the work behind the art is just as important as the final piece. Knowing this, he placed his plans beside the work as to give them equal credit. He was also significant in continuing on Duchamps ready-made idea where the artist does not have to produce the actual work.

           Michael Craig Martin, another conceptual artist who regarded Duchamps ready-made idea as hugely crucial to the development of art, has been a hugely influential artist in the ways in which he approaches his concepts. He was also in later years a lecturer of Goldsmiths, where the Young British Artists originated from. He was born in 1941 in Ireland but moved to America at an early age and studied painting at Yale University. Whilst in America he would have been influenced by the American art scene, which was flourishing with all the migrant artists from Europe. This hub for art would be incredibly important in Craig-Martin’s interest in art. Upon completing his degree in 1966 he moved to England where he still works. In 1973 he taught as a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths college, London, where he had huge influence over students during the 1980s and 90s. His part was pivotal in the forming of the YBAs, publicising the Freeze exhibition and guiding the artists into their proper directions. His work, although conceptual in content, is very inspired by minimalism. His simple use of simple, household objects can be seen as a modern equivalent of Duchamp’s ready-mades. Possibly the most famous of these works is “Oak Tree” a glass of water on a shelf, with a plaque next to the piece dictating the artists argument that the glass of water on the shelf is in fact, an oak tree. His reasoning is that because he is the artist, he can change the glass into an oak tree. This brought up questions of how the artists intent was an extremely important issue of the time. Because of his use of domestic items, the art is relatable and reads easily and correctly, having conceptual lucidity.

           The artist did not constrict himself to these pieces and worked on installations, sculptures, paintings, wall drawings and many others. Craig-Martin remains a very famous and influential artist, working mostly in screen prints and large painted wall murals. These pieces can be seen as a kind of modern pop art. In one of these works entitled “History” the artist juxtaposes scale and objects to create a nonsense which although can be seen as unorganized comes across as graphical and neat in appearance.  This clinical sense may be implying something about our organized society or how history is portrayed in the present. Despite what it actually means, his work can be seen as very contemporary, even though it heavily references pop art and its mass production. It is extremely difficult to use a technique that has been used before and have it emerge looking new.

           Two artists which have applied this technique to Manzoni’s living sculptures are Gilbert and George, a united duo, who work together. They are made up of Gilbert Proesch who was born in Italy, 1943 and George Passmore in Devon, 1942. Although nothing has ever been openly discussed over their relationship, it is widely considered that they are a couple. They met at Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 1967 after it turned out George was the only one who could understand Gilbert’s poor English. Their studios consist of a room entirely dedicated to subject matter. In it are boxes and boxes of things, filed in order in A4 sized boxes. In another room is a computer studio devoted to the creation of sketches on the computer. This clinical setting is very similar to the way in which the artists function. All of their pieces are entitled as sculptures, even if they are 2-Dimensional (this maybe a reference to Duchamp’s attempt to break down the barriers of the genres). They work in mixed media with photographs mostly with a trademark format of a rectangle or square broken down into a grid. But their degree show piece for Saint Martin’s was not dissimilar to Manzoni’s living sculptures idea. Gilbert and George dressed up in suits and stood on a podium like base, depicting themselves as living sculptures. In the film “A portrait of the artists as young men, 1970” the artists are filmed doing nothing for seven minutes. The concept behind this work was the same as the living sculptures idea. This developed into their entire body of work, and everything they do is now an extension of the personas they have created for themselves. The two appear in suits whenever in public and very rarely are seen apart. These guises, are the vital part to their work as everything they do stems out from it, they are the central them of their work. Although moving into their later work, the artists included religion, sexuality, alcohol, class, nationality, death, identity and politics as themes in their work. In “The Naked Eye, 1994” the artists are depicted without their iconic suits, completely naked but still hiding behind their hands. This can be seen as a portrayal of the loss of character that the two feel when they are not in character.

           In 1984 the pair were nominated for the Turner Prize only to lose to fellow artist, Malcolm Morley. They did win in 1986 however. They have been very important artists throughout their careers broadening the horizons of what art is and how it is portrayed to the public. They drew the art away from the actual art and more towards the artist, a technique used by Piero Manzoni in his work. The artists believe firmly that their art breaks down the social barriers of society, and I believe this too. Because of their light heartedness and almost confessional work they really appeal to me.

           Although many people do not like conceptual art, it must be argued that it has been one of the most dramatic and important turns in art. The expansion of art makes it easier for an artist to work in whichever way he or she feels comfortable. It was crucial to what art has become nowadays, and I shudder to think what would have happened if the movement had not occurred.

Bibliography

Introduction

http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/glossary/definition.jsp?entryId=73

Marcel Duchamp

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=1036&page=1&sole=y&collab=y&attr=y&sort=default&tabview=bio

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/duchampmanraypicabia/rooms/default.shtm

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=4029

Nude descending staircase no2, 1912

The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915-1923

Fountain, 1917, all pictures supplied by tate.com

Piero Mazoni

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=26872&searchid=9599 

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=27330&searchid=12749

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=1571&page=1&sole=y&collab=y&attr=y&sort=default&tabview=bio

http://www.artpool.hu/ketseg/5-1-2/artist/MANZONI.html

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200506/s1390036.htm

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=1418&page=1&sole=y&collab=y&attr=y&sort=default&tabview=bio

artist’s shit, 1961, supplied by artpool.hu

artists breath, 1960, supplied by tate.com

Sol Lewitt

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=1504&page=1&sole=y&collab=y&attr=y&sort=default&tabview=bio

http://www.oberlin.edu/amam/exhibit_simpleforms.htm

http://radicalart.info/concept/LeWitt/paragraphs.html

Both wall drawings supplied by tate.com

49 Three-Part Variations on Three Different Kinds of Cubes (1967–71) – supplied by Allen Memorial Art Museum online

Michael Craig Martin

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=955&page=1&sole=y&collab=y&attr=y&sort=default&tabview=bio

http://www.michaelcraig-martin.com/

http://www.artnet.com/artist/4547/michael-craig-martin.html

Oak Tree, 1973, supplied by tate.com

History, 2001, supplied by artnet.com

Gilbert & George

www.artlex.com/ArtLex/c/collaboration.html

http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/turnerprize/history/gilbertgeorge.htm

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=1163&page=1&sole=y&collab=y&attr=y&sort=default&tabview=bio

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/gilbertandgeorge/

Still from a portrait of the artists as young men, 7 minutes long, supplied by tate.com

Naked Eye, 1994, supplied by tate.com

Gordon Douglas 16^th February 2009

Now that the art of the non-lecture has been elucidated by our last intellectual’s no-show, The Usual Suspects heads south for the second meeting in which we, together with our hosts, Your-space, will attempt to read between the lines of creative forms of writing and how these are presented, distributed and consumed.

The Usual Suspects is a series of tongue-in-cheek (intellectually sound) non-lectures conceived to challenge the cult of personality and aloofness in the creative field, and to provide a platform for both experienced and upstart critical thinkers to exchange knowledge. This series uses the spectres of the usual suspects and the areas of research associated with their various oeuvres as a starting point for generating new conversations.

You are invited to participate
on: Wednesday, the 25th of February

at: 18.30 hours

location: Kanaalstraat 8, Eindhoven

when Clement Greenberg will not be presenting his thoughts on Writing Creatively

A project sponsored by Fonds BKVB
With the kind support of Your-space

For Clem-readings see: http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/default.html

The Avant Garde didn’t exist in the Middles Ages and it is unlikely to exist as a viable movement at the end of the 21st century. It will exist as gesture, just as a historical movements such as the Arts and Crafts Movement, Luddites, or the Pythagorean Cult continue to find followers, there will be writers acting out the tropes and practices of Arthur Rimbaud, Hugo Ball, and Ezra Pound.

The Avant Garde is a phenomenon of the Industrial Revolution, mass production, and the expansion of the Middle Class within the context of nation states with the apparatus that we took for granted in the 20th century: a constitution, natural rights, and the protection of property. The Avant Garde operated in opposition to the stability and conservatism of Middle Class Culture. It required this stability, just as the operation of capital, banking, and commerce required a stable society. Middle Class Culture was either the means by which this control was exerted, or the symptom of a stable social order. When I say control it lends itself to the idea that there were essential players who made this decision: “You know what I will do; I will create a culture that will control the masses!” The Florentine master criminal rubs his meaty palms together and smokes some blow. Rather, the conditions of a Middle Class Culture that was stable resulted in the growth of capital, banking, commerce, technological innovation, and armies. These products of Middle Class Culture triumphed over those states and cultures that did not have this cocktail in place.

In the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the monolith of Middle Class Culture didn’t yet exist. But the Church remained as the monolith of the day. The Church existed in relation to a text: The Bible. When Martin Luther nailed his 95 Thesis to the wall, and then they were printed on the newly-  invented printing press and distributed, the essential myth of the counter-text, the counter-movement, and the role of the writer as a voice of protest were introduced. Luther acted in opposition to the hegemony of the Church. Protest was not possible in the Middle Ages. Servitude was possible. Protest ended with a perpetual sentence in a dungeon, death by bonfire, or a trip on the Ship of Fools.

By the middle of the 19th century, Middle Class Culture had replaced the Church as a cultural monolith. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine operated in opposition to propriety. They challenged the authority and necessary conservativism of Middle Class Culture and the Academy with an aesthetic of opposition. This was the root of the Avant Garde.

Like any oppositional movement, though, the Avant Garde operated primarily in the context of the dominant Middle Class Culture. There needed to be the cultural monolith with its capital, banking, commerce, technological innovation, and armies. Mason Coosey, a professor at Columbia, noted, “The Avant Garde art jousts with propriety, but takes care never to unseat it.” While a poet such as Rimbaud didn’t depend on patrons, many of the most notable figures in the movement received substantial amounts of cash from patrons embedded deeply in the Middle Class Culture that to which they supposedly operated in opposition. For instance, Harriet Shaw Weaver, a wealthy heiress and Marxist, supported James Joyce. Even a later-day figure such as Charles Bukowski, hardly an Avant Garde artist but clearly an embodiment of the Bohemian, anti-establish aesthetic, survived on book sales through Middle Class Cultural institutions and suburban bookstores.

The greatest moment of the Avant Garde occurred at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 and 1917 with the explosion of Dada and the corresponding birth of self-aware countermovements opposing Middle Class Culture. After the murderous insanity of the First World War, a clear stand of opposition to the logic/illogic of the Age of Reason seemed not only necessary but humane.

As in any dialectic, there were two sides to the conversation: Culture and Counter-Culture. CP Snow would stand on one side of this conversation, dividing it into two cultures, high and low. He perhaps took his cue from Clement Greenberg’s essay, “The Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” published in the Partisan Review in 1939. Greenberg portrayed the Avant Garde and Kitch as opposing forces. To him the Avant Garde embodied political resistance, an engagement with formal artistic practice, and more troubling for Greenberg, “a search for the absolute.” In contrast, Greenberg defined kitsch as “the product of the Industrial Revolution which urbanized the masses of Western Europe and American and established what is called universal literacy.” Here the Avant Garde work operated against Middle Class Culture, kitsch worked as a celebration and grotesque display of the gestures of mass culture.

Greenberg later regretted his definition of kitsch, because any visit to a museum store will quickly find last decade’s Avant Garde turned into today’s kitsch. Hilter railed against the evils of German Expressionism and banned the work, but how much more destructive has it been to Expressionism to have Munsch’s The Scream reproduced as everything from an image on a coffee mug, a gesture in a popular movie (Home Alone), to an inflatable doll?

One of the triumphs of Middle Class Culture has been its ability to assimilate or even colonize protest. When the Avant Garde realized they operated in a totalizing system, art moved into the cynicism of Postmodernism. A walk through the Museum of Modern Art shows the progression. What began as Impressionism, a kind of Year Zero for the Avant Garde and Modernism, where suddenly the smooth surfaces and narratives of the mid-century academic style began to dissolve into paint on a canvas, until in the middle of the 20th century, pictures, became just blank canvases hanging on the wall. What Greenberg had been worried about in 1939, the impulse toward the absolute, arrived at the absolute end for paint on a canvas. I would say similar dead ends were reached sooner by novelists such as James Joyce in Finnigan’s Wake and Gertrude Stein in The Making of Americans.

By the middle of the 20th century the Avant Garde, as it had been in the turn of the century, was spent. By the middle of the 1950s an old verb was retrofitted to describe assimilation and successful colonization by the Academy and Middle Class Culture: co-opted.

Postmodernism, in contrast to Modernism, contained a far less militant and a far more cynical relationship between contemporary artists and the Middle Class. Pop Art, for example, attempted to appropriate kitsch on its own terms. Andy Warhol aped kitsch and sold his work as kitsch and become famous because of kitsch. His verbal equivalent could be found in writers such as Donald Barthelme, Barry Hannah, and Mary Robison.

The style of the Avant Garde informed what is now commercially called Modernism. Modernism is a home decor aesthetic espoused by magazines such as Dwell. In a similar vein, the writing style of Avant Garde denuded of its directly political content becomes a style of writing: experimental writing, and writers study experimental writing as they might the writing of sonnets, murder mysteries, or screenplays. A chair may be in a Modern style: “[Modern Outdoor] continues the theme of clean lines with a modern look that is the basis of the entire Etra Collection.” A book might be written in an experimental style. Here is TC Boyle’s kitchy blurb for The People of Paper, “… a novel like no other, emerging from the chrysalis of magic and imagination to create a world of letters that seeps back into the world we know and then metamorphoses into something else altogether.”

This might signal the complete and utter end and exhaustion of the Avant Garde. However, Postmodernism also saw a reassessment of the Catholicism applied to formal innovation. Some writers have returned to the essential ethos of protest against a mass culture as a structure designed to keep those in power in power and those out of power out of power. So while formal innovation often indicates the introduction of startling new flavors!(TM) in otherwise conservative work there has also been formally conservative works that contributed to the rise of what has been called multiculturalism or cultural pluralism, but might in retrospect be called Globalism. That is, these are works that operate in within the confines of an existing tradition but also attempt to define a cultural space independent of mass culture and the frame of the nation state. This work has been instrumental in contributing to what is widely described as the fragmentation of mass culture into niche markets, a million subcultures, into a chaotic cascade of affinity groups and lifestyles. The mass culture as known by Paul Verlaine and Andy Warhol has fragmented into a kibble.

In the past, the Avant Garde occupied a fixed structure. Protest was assimilated into the overall structure. Middle Class Culture merely assimilated the gestures of the Avant Garde and hired the good stylists to work in the universities. The Avant Garde or formal experimentation never endangered the underlying structure, and contributed to the overall dynamism of this system and its ability to assimilate protest. Dada, the high point of the Avant Garde, was merely industrial capitalism passing gas.

The underlying plasticity of the Middle Class Cultural structure has given out. Before the introduction of global communications, the limits of communication to vehicles of fixed size — newspapers, magazines, and bookshelves — outlined the volume of communication. Any book placed into this limited system displaced other books either in newspaper coverage, in magazines, or on bookshelves. But with the rise of a global communication network this has changed. The Web is a scale-free network, which means that it can accommodate the addition of any book places into the system without displacing other books. Unlike the limited pipes of commerce and attention characteristic of mass culture — where writers are either published or not published — in networked culture any writer can be published and the entire size of the network expands to accommodate this growth.

Instead of being to able to accommodate protest within the fixed channels of attention, what has been the mass culture has broken into fragments as the entire network grows. Each blow breaks a countermovement from the center. That countermovement occupies its own cultural space. Within the confines of the new cultural shard, protest is converted into preaching to the choir. It becomes the dogma and cant of a self-contained cultural unit.

It may be helpful to think of culture as a bubble. Middle Class Culture was a bubble. It was defined, in part, by the surface tension of limited channels of distribution for culturally defining objects such as books. With the rise of a global network, this tension loosened the bubble broke into hundreds of bubbles. Some of these bubbles retain a shared wall with what had been the Middle Class Culture. If there is a persuasive assault on the center of the bubble, the artist, or movement finds themselves separated from the main body of the bubble and in their own bubble. If they’ve made their bubble is useful to other people, other bubble dwellers might check it out. As a countermovement, The Avant Garde depended on the stability of Middle Class Culture in order to provide a context and direction. This new system presents fundamentally different challenges.

Clement Greenberg (Photo by Hans Namuth, 1951)

Unless I am doing my sums wrong, today is the 100 year anniversary of Clement Greenberg’s birth. This notorious figure, surely as transformative of the art world in own his way as Lessing, Ruskin or Baudelaire were in theirs, died in 1994. And indeed his criticism, like theirs, lives on.

If the ability to ruffle feathers, start fights, occasionally to open eyes as much as minds, even years after one’s own death, is in any way an index of greatness, Greenberg was a very great critic indeed. Yet his relationship with what may yet prove to have been the absolute stellar zenith of American painting, the age of Abstract Expressionism, is still not very well understood. To what extent did he ‘create’ this climactic Modernist moment? Could it have happened without him? And how different would it all have been without that extraordinary prose-style, clean and tough and distinctively American, through which — necessarily so, in those days before mass air travel, cheap colour reproductions and non-stop blockbuster exhibitions — the world beyond Manhattan first began to engage with Pollock, de Kooning, Still, Newman and the rest?

Probably, as is famously the case with the effects of revolution, it’s simply too soon to tell. Not that this should obscure the fact that Greenberg has been atrociously ill-served by his biographers. Florence Rubenfeld’s Clement Greenberg: A Life (1998) was intellectually underpowered yet overstuffed with gossip. This, though, was perhaps preferable to Alice Goldfarb Marquis’s Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg (2005), a hachet-job pure and simple. Yes, it’s terrible that Greenberg wasn’t as politically correct as the more bovine sort of present-day Ivy League undergraduate, that he was no more flawless as a father than he was as a husband, and that he often upset people. That, though, rather misses the point. Few people, I suspect, live utterly blameless lives. What was unusual about Greenberg was, in contrast, something to do with his clarity of expression, the astonishing range of literary and intellectual associations he brought to his writing, and the freshness, honesty and force of his responses. He really did look at art, not just think about it, and he had the ability to make other people look at it, too. And if anyone ever makes sense of all this, conjuring Greenberg up with a narrative that neither whitewashes nor demonises him, the acheivement will be considerable.

In the meantime, there is something to be gained from reading accounts of this paradoxical, complex, sometimes maddening yet clearly also extremely attractive man from those who actually knew him. Those by Helen Frankenthaler, Karen Wilkin, and Darby Bannard are, for example, all illuminating in their various ways. (In 2000 the New Criterion ran a very interesting piece about Greenberg by Tim Hilton, but I’ve been unable to find a proper link to it.)

More illuminating of all, though, is the experience of reading Greenberg’s own writing — not what others have said that he said, or scrappy fillets hacked out of coherent essays, either, but Greenberg’s actual texts, at full length, in their correct context. Happily, an impressive amount of his criticism is now available online, here, along with quite a lot of complementary information and resources. For while it’s entirely reasonable to disagree with Greenberg’s judgements, there’s something more than slightly shoddy about dismissing them, and him, on the basis of garbled third-hand misreadings, let alone the equally prolific batch of self-serving, tendentious straw-man characterisations. It’s remarkable to note how few preconceptions regarding the Demon King of Formalism and his evil ways actually survive once exposed to the atmosphere of what he actually wrote.

And while we’re on the subject of recommendations, the Harold Letters are also worth reading, not least for the impression they give of boundless curiosity, a strong sense of irony and an intensity of intellectual engagement unmistakable even amidst the sillier interludes of youthful showing off, acting up and all-purpose pose-striking. If Greenberg grew considerably less silly as he matured, those qualities of curiosity, irony and engagement survived much longer than they do in most intellectual careers. Perhaps there is a lesson, an inspiration almost, to be found in all this.

How, finally, to commemorate a century of Greenberg? Go look at some art — if possible, with fresh eyes, as if what you are seeing might actually amaze you either with its formal perfection or, more likely perhaps, with its abject lack of visual ambition. Or go back into the studio and make something that really works. Or read some of Greenberg’s prose, alert to how very vivid and strong those words still sound. Or perhaps just raise a glass to the memory of this distinctive, clear and uncompromising intellect — and then start an argument about art, as if standards in art actually mattered — even if, in doing so, you manage to upset someone along the way.

Clement Greenberg, most immediate and lively of dead critics, rest in peace.

Image courtesy tomwolfe.com

Note: We are discarding the editorial/royal “we” for today’s post.

As a bit of remedial vacation reading, I finally got around last week to reading Tom Wolfe’s 1975 classic The Painted Word. A brief book with a simple yet devastating thesis, it chronicles the process by which, according to Wolfe, modern art from 1950 through 1975 discarded not only realism and representation but also “lines, colors, forms, and contours…frames, walls, galleries, museums” and “disappeared up its own fundamental aperture” to become “Art Theory pure and simple…literature undefiled by vision.” In this new order of things, prominent art critics such as Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and later, Leo Steinberg ascended to reign supreme, while the artists they championed, from Pollock to the Conceptualists and beyond, soon became the servants of the critics’ pet ideas.

Throughout The Painted Word, Wolfe carefully avoids taking aim at modern art per se, which he disparages only indirectly or by implication. (“As for the paintings—de gustibus non disputandum est. But the theories, I insist, were beautiful.”) Despite his famously dandyish suits, Wolfe is not an aesthete but a social satirist first and foremost, and the real subject  of his book is the incestuous art community, which he estimates (in 1975, but perhaps little has changed since then) to comprise no more than 10,000 members worldwide. Having dubbed this community Cultureburg (a weak pun on the surnames of the critics mentioned), Wolfe skewers it by tracing the way in which idiosyncratic, often half-baked theories spread throughout it—”virally,” as we would now say—to become unquestioned dogma. Thus The Painted Word is a study in what Orwell called “smelly little orthodoxies.”

As such, it succeeds wonderfully; the apoplectic reactions it received from artists and critics upon its publication testified to the nerve it had struck. An especially ripe target of Wolfe’s scorn is Greenberg’s concept of flatness, i.e., the discarding of all three-dimensional effects such that a painting does not violate “the integrity of the picture plane.” In theory, a recipe for an interesting mode of representation, but in practice, an increasingly absurd dogma that sent artists scrambling to achieve “purity” by ridding their art of all “illusions”—and finally, of any content whatsoever. Following this madness through Wolfe’s jaundiced eye is heady fun, and tends to confirm the worst suspicions of those who, like me, are skeptical of much modern art to begin with.

At the same time, there are some obvious flaws in the argument Wolfe advances, even if the nature of the book makes these somewhat unavoidable. He doesn’t quote the criticism of Greenberg, et al. at length, allowing them to “defend themselves” properly; he savages them rather than engaging with them. But of course, to engage at length would slow the pace of the satire, and the interested reader is free to read these critics’ lucubrations in full if he or she dares. Likewise, Wolfe doesn’t advance any aesthetic values of his own to counter those he mocks—but again, he is interested in social observation, not art criticism, and would have undercut his own detached perspective by posturing as a rival Clement Greenberg. If this approach occasionally causes him to underrate some worthwhile artists—such as Roy Lichtenstein, whose wit and technical skill Wolfe can’t quite bring himself to denounce entirely—then the sacrifice seems necessary to a case that, at the time, was crying out to be made.

In the end, the most serious failure of the book is one of prophecy. Like many a satirist—Kurt Vonnegut comes to mind—Wolfe has a keen eye for the past and present and virtually no insight into the future. At the close of The Painted Word, he imagines enlightened 21st-century art scholars looking back with “sniggers, laughter, and good-humored amazement” at the follies of their forebears. In reality, of course, we have plenty of our own follies to contend with: a contemporary art market facing a dangerous speculative bubble (this can’t be too surprising to the author of The Bonfire of the Vanities); contemporary art that often strives simply to feed that market; and a critical landscape that is still overrun with Theory, less and less of it “literate” in any sense. New voices are needed to satirize these new absurdities, since Wolfe, whose prose in 1975 was already problematic (Oh, exclamation point! How quickly you ruin otherwise decent sarcasm!) and has steadily degenerated since, is no longer the man for the job. Neither is the author of this post, but I hold out hope that the ultimate peanut gallery, the blogosphere, will eventually produce someone capable of filling Wolfe’s shoes—and that the art scene will eventually produce more of the only real cure for bad theory: good art.

Right at the heart of Tate Britain’s current Francis Bacon retrospective, at the literal physical centre of the exhibition, there is a smallish room. Unlike every other room in the exhibition, this one isn’t lined with large and imposing oil paintings, virtually all of them hung in gilded frames: glazed, reflective, spectacular.

Instead, the room is filled with evidence for the way in which the paintings outside were made. There are pages ripped from art books, pictures on newsprint aged the colour of old jaundiced skin, photos of friends and rivals commissioned from John Deakin, lists in a sprawling generous hand, body-building magazines with homoerotic overtones, ink doodles, pictures of Bacon’s own pictures, photos ripped from current affairs magazines featuring wrestlers and famous Nazis and dead people, prints of film stills, the predictable Eadweard Muybridge sequences, the concrete remains of a less predictable interest in David Gower — all of it torn and battered by use, everything spattered with paint — fodder or perhaps rather compost for the painter’s imagination, the refuse of decades of imaginative consumption and elimination, leftovers of creation, the rich and pungent detritus of the studio floor.

It’s fitting, I think, that this room is at the centre of the exhibition, because it takes us right to the crux of at least the most immediate problems we face in confronting Bacon’s work. Should we be looking at the subject matter, or at the paint? Are we here for horror, about which we’ve all heard so much, or for beauty? Are we in fact doomed to stand staring at all the accumulated clutter, metaphorical as well as actual, of this most public of private lives, or is there any way of getting past it in order to reach the actual art itself — and what would we find if we did?

The first point to make about the present Tate retrospective is that it offers — with an institutional seriousness that should by no means be taken for granted these days — an opportunity to evaluate the career of Francis Bacon (1909-1992), in many critics’ view the most important painter working in Britain for most of the twentieth century. Tate curators Chris Stephens and Matthew Gale have staged an unforgettable event. Including something like 71 works, each one of them a major work on canvas and a few of them large-scale triptychs, it’s very big exhibition, in every possible sense. Although this is in fact Bacon’s fifth retrospective, London hasn’t seen this much of Bacon since, almost unbelievably, another Tate retrospective back in 1985, seven years before the artist’s death. Nor is London likely to see so much, at least that this level of quality, any time soon.

Fewer but better Bacons
Yet even the apparently simple matter of mentioning these 71 works starts to open up that can of worms — fleshy, writhing, plump yet vulnerable worms, presumably, their intertwined slimy forms a glorious smeary blur of rose and mauve and puce, lost in unknowable wormy ecstacies and martyrdoms against an uninflected velvet-black ground — introduced above.

For nothing’s ever that simple with Bacon. Everyone knows, for instance, how there’s almost nothing at all left of Bacon’s work prior to 1945, due to the thoroughness with which the artist’s own mode of ‘editing’ — editorial techniques in this case involving stanley knives, boot-heels, and fires — effectively achieved the great Freudian desideratum of killing off Bacon’s art-historical ‘fathers’ (not only Picasso, but various far less famous, hence far more embarassing figures) while, at the same time, establishing the crucial fact that from that point forward, Bacon’s reputation was going to be as much a piece of his own hand-made work as any of his paintings. Thus while the means by which Bacon’s path set off at such a sharp angle both from those of the Surrealists and, let’s remember, the Neo-Romantics, too, remain a fascinating topic for debate, since 1945 or thereabouts such debates have no longer been weighed down by much in the way of concrete physical evidence.

Then there are editing issues at the other end of Bacon’s career, too. When, in 1958, Bacon deserted Erica Brausen and the Hanover Gallery and signed instead with Marlborough Fine Art, he traded what was, in effect, a sympathetic if sometimes opportunistic friendship for a cold-blooded commercial contract, albeit one cheered up considerably by the devoted, occasionally heavy-handed attentions of Marlborough’s Valerie Beston. And while Brausen respected Bacon’s desire to rework pictures to the point of destruction, or indeed well beyond that point, team Marlborough did not. The gallery’s co-founde Frank Lloyd used to arrange for works to be collected while the paint was still dry, having them driven them away at speed, thus rescuing them from the revisions, doubts and destructive rampages of their creator. Bacon, in turn, tolerated this, because Marlborough helped him earn the jaw-dropping sums that made possible, for instance, a gift of £100,000 to poor Erica Brausen many years later, when the artist learned his old dealer was seriously ill and in need of medical treatment. Bacon’s contempt for money was legendary — he was as addicted to generosity and throw-away extravance as he was to gambling, risk-taking and compulsively protective myth-making — but at the same time, for an artist who was perfectly capable of using brand-new cashmere pullovers as rags with which to blend and smear his colours, showing off this contempt worked far more smoothly when he actually had the cash to do it.

As well as boosting Bacon’s reputation and ensuring his financial stability, however, Marlborough’s intervention in the creative process also had, as the years passed, the effect of flooding the market with second-rate Bacons or worse. These were much in evidence at the Hayward’s Bacon show of 1998, and indeed are still to be found now and then in Bond Street or King Street, attracting respect and Old Master prices in equal measure, while at the same time looking as strange, inert and pitiable as the corpse of a newly-dead stranger.

In the present exhibition, however, the curators have, to a large extent, done Bacon’s work for him. Bacon’s weaker works, especially from the later years, have been banished. (In case anyone’s counting, the show includes one painting from the 1930s, nine from the 40s, 24 from the 50s, 17 from the 60s, 9 from the 70s, 10 from the 80s, and one from the 90s — a lopsided pyramid, the oddity of which may be underscored when Bacon’s long-awaited catalogue raisonne comes to be published.) If Bacon’s reputation is to be tested, the curators seem to say, why then the testing ought to be done on the basis of Bacon’s best works, not his average ones. And while I suppose one could argue that this distorts, to a degree, Bacon’s legacy, it certainly makes for an infinitely more powerful exhibition.

Stripped Bare
In terms of arrangement, the exhibition is implicitly chronological, although the ten rooms themselves are awarded vague yet suggestive titles, along the lines of ‘Animal’, ‘Zone’, and ‘Apprehension’. (Unusually, the exhibition website is as useful as it is attractive, including alongside quite a lot else some fascinating old BBC interviews with Bacon, demonstrating at once the painter’s light-footed expository genius, as well as an accent one would be surprised to hear these days, and of course that famously dangerous charm.)

But the necessity of starting history, as it were, in 1945 — by which time Bacon was 36 years old, which is to say, a year younger than Watteau was when he died, and several years older than Giorgione, Carel Fabritius or Egon Schiele managed — is underscored by yet another apparently brave and certainly surprising decision on the part of the curators, which is to purge the exhibition of virtually any information relating to Bacon’s actual life. To the extent this material intrudes at all, it’s safely quarantined off in the ‘Archive’ room mentioned above, well away from the art. It’s as if the curators felt the need to scrape from the glass that covers these canvasses all the muddy accretions of fact, myth and fantasy — those twice-told tales swept up with the debris of the Colony Room’s floor, old drinking pals’ anecdotage cobbled together when the fading of funds and short-term memory was equally apparent, that Derek Jacobi film — in order to force us to look at the pictures beneath.

So it is that within the exhibition itself, Bacon’s biography is stripped down to the absolute minimum necessary to make sense of the images set out before us. We learn, for instance, about a visit to Tangiers that altered Bacon’s palette for a while, about Bacon’s fascination with the writings of T. S. Eliot, and about the suicide of George Dyer, without which a room lined with triptychs might lose meaning. But could one glean from the exhibition that Bacon had been born in Dublin just prior to the introduction of the third Home Rule Bill, that in the 1920s he spent several formative years in Paris, that he sought out sadomasochistic sex, that his politics were mostly ‘old fashioned liberal’ although leavened (as with Gilbert & George) by a warm regard for Margaret Thatcher, or that he usually wore too much makeup?

Almost certainly not — and for what it’s worth, I think that’s entirely a good thing. The current retrospective is, after all, the first to have taken place with direct intervention neither from Bacon himself, nor from David Sylvester, whose interpretive role following Bacon’s death verged on the annoyingly proprietary. It is, accordingly, the curators’ show — their chance to impose their own framing devices on the artist, to reshape his memory as they see fit, and then leave us to judge the result. And in a refreshing inversion of present-day convention, not to mention all institutional marketing logic, that Bacon turns out to be a painter in oils, an artist, rather than yet another celebrity personality doomed to fame, tragedy and a vividly complicated sex-life. If there’s a nervousness lurking somewhere behind this stance, it plays itself out only gradually, almost behind the scenes, in the supports (as it were) fo the exhibition, rather than the shiny surfaces.

Critical distractions
And thus we come, or so it might seem, to the pictures themselves. They are, virtually all of them, very large — hung widely-spaced across the walls of large, white-painted rooms, under high ceilings, bathed in artificial and very white light. The flat glazed surfaces catch and throw back the reflections cast by visitors who wander back and forth, sometimes lecturing each other genially yet self-consciously like a Radio 4 programme gone slightly wrong, but just as often reverently silent — ’simply looking’, insofar as that phrase can function without collapsing under the density of its embedded oxymoron — taking in what they see. Like all of us, they’ve heard a lot about Francis Bacon. This is their chance to encounter the work first-hand, and to make their own judgements. And there’s something about the atmosphere — subdued, taken aback almost — that suggests what an impact the pictures are making. One of the few times I’ve seen this happen was at the Tate’s 1999 Jackson Pollock exhibition, but only in the later rooms. Here, it starts as soon as one walks through the doors.

And yet, even here, confronting canvas after canvas — writhing form after lusciously alizaran crimson-soaked writhing form, lurid smear after silken-slimy titanium smear, the sludges of indescribable violets and blues eventually dying gelatinaciously into a viscous sea of ivory black — it’s hard to come face-to-face with the work without a pervasive, distracting sense that other things are getting in the way. How, for instance, are we to silence those other voices that have told us, over so many years, usually with passion and occasionally with insight, what we’re to make of Francis Bacon? How much of what we see in these pictures is what we have been told to see in them?

Of course the main thing we know about these pictures is that, well, they’re horrible. When Mrs Thatcher described her erstwhile supporter as ‘that artist who paints those horrible pictures’, her alleged philistinism was less remarkable than her gift for gauging, accurately, the public temper. Whether the public is, in this case, correct is an issue that to which we’ll return later. For the moment, though, all I want to suggest is that a great deal has been said and written about Bacon, much of which has permeated a long way into the popular culture, and that this in turn renders it profoundly difficult to look at Bacon’s work without letting David Sylvester, Robert Melville and so forth get in the way — let alone those critics who were, for their various reasons, less enthusiastic. And by the same token, for anyone who ever reads about such things, it’s genuinely hard to look at these paintings without conjuring up other work that was painted at the same time — the glancing reference to Pollock a moment ago underscores this — or indeed, without trying to shoehorn Bacon into some designated if clearly ill-fitting art-historical pigeonhole.

Stop the war, I want to get off
It will take considerably more than mere death to stop our Modern Masters from competing with one another. We know, of course, that Bacon claimed to have little time for the New York School. Could this former interior decorator and inveterate gambler have contrived a more cutting insult than when he described abstraction as ‘decorative’, calling Pollock ‘that old lace maker’, or when he compared de Kooning’s carnivorously sensual, scary women to the figures on playing cards? And yet, for all that, looking at his paintings now, who would insist that Bacon never learned to profit from the happy accident — a thick ejaculation of paint that somehow hit the spot — or that his smudgy yet unapologetic figuration drew no courage from de Kooning’s example?

The big canvases, the painterly confraternity, post-war luxuriation in that species of sensory excess that only saturated pigment can reliably deliver — suddenly the Atlantic seems to narrow, the link with France attenuated marginally by wartime and long habituation. If Bacon could kill one father, in other words, he could kill plenty more. He may have played up the differences between his art and what was happening in America at the same time, and others may have had good reason to do the same, but — well, today, looking back with the sort of clarity conferred by distance, it’s hard to be quite so sure.

And indeed that’s yet another framing device: Bacon’s place in the epic struggle that once pitted the giants of American Abstract Expressionism against the School of Paris plus miscellaneous fellow travellers, tales of which now form such a colourful adjunct to the generally more prosaic history of the Cold War. It’s the price we pay for having read those arguments between David Sylvester and Clement Greenberg in the pages of The Nation, never mentioning Bacon himself, and yet so hard to forget when looking at Bacon’s work.

For a Bacon canvas is constantly shimmering between its actual physical reality, and some other sort of meaning. In this case, the meaning that keeps trying to assert itself is some sort of statement about which way post-war modernism was going. Was tired-out, over-literary Europe or young, vital, vigorous America — or should that read ‘refined, intelligent Europe or crude, incompetent, hysterical America’? — going to be the one to answer this question?

In a room full of Bacons, it’s hard not to see a Rothko, a de Kooning, a Pollock reflected in the glass. For it’s got to be said that when Bacon turns up in accounts of twentieth century art history, he’s almost always presented, even now, if not as an English [sic] eccentric tout court, then as a peculiar late sport of figurative painting, owing something both to the Surrealists and to the Expressionists but marching in step with neither — an oddity, island-born and sui generis, too famous to omit but at the same time, frankly, a bit of an awkward annoyance within anyone’s over-arching narrative.

Marlboro[ugh] Men
Were the curators of the present exhibition slightly insecure about all of this? Did they worry that some of the criticisms out there, launched forth in dusty journals and long-forgotten interviews, still have to power to wound?

The catalogue suggests exactly that. Specifically, it kicks off with an essay by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Gary Tinterow (who’s helping to curate the exhibition in its New York iteration), titled ‘Bacon and His Critics’. There’s boosterism galore here, apologetics of no great subtlety, quite a lot of plangent collective guilt for America’s inexplicable failure to love Bacon quite as much as they should have done, plus the odd strain of very special pleading indeed:

Bacon was sidelined in American art criticism for most of his career. And it is now finally becoming evident that this marginalisation should be partly attributed to Bacon’s homosexuality. Although, since the 1960s, he has been one of the best-known British artists in America, sharing that distinction over time with Henry Moore, David Hockney and, later, Lucian Freud, Bacon’s overt homosexuality was incompatible with the disguised Puritan and overtly macho ethos of many of his American contemporaries — artists, critics and writers — at least until the 1980s, when the advent of feminist art history, gender studies and queer theory created a newly receptive environment for art made by non-heterosexuals.

What to make of this? Let’s leave aside — please — astonishment at the curators’ choice of the word ‘overt’ to describe anyone’s homosexuality in 1940s and 50s Britain (a society, after all, in which a ‘queer theory’ graduate qualification would hardly have opened useful doors), recognition of the degrees of relativity with which such a claim must surely be encased (good manners, circumspection and the calculated self-deception of others has kept those closets intact rather longer than some might think), amazement that figuration as smearily generalised as Bacon’s could be seen to telegraph active male homosexuality to anyone (Bacon wasn’t exactly David Hockney, or for that matter even Keith Vaughan) as well as, of course, sympathy for Tinterow himself, who must be so very disappointed not to have been chosen as Philippe de Montebello’s successor at the Met. And without wishing to minimise the travails faced by homosexual men during Bacon’s lifetime, let’s leave aside my strong suspicion that Bacon’s asthma, which was serious and occasionally disabling, caused him more difficulty during the course of his long life than his sexuality ever did.

No, the point, for what it’s worth, is much simpler than any of that. And a lot of it comes down to that unfailing critical tic douloureux of our own age, complusive Clem-bashing.

It’s now a matter of art-historical doctrine both that Bacon was ‘gay’ (whatever that’s taken to mean), and also that Greenberg was ‘homophobic’ (ditto). Connect the dots and, hey presto, we suddenly have an unarguable explanation why, his current critical stature notwithstanding, Bacon took a while to gain traction in American art-critical opinion, albeit less time to conquer that American art market.

It all stands to reason, doesn’t it? For obviously, there is only one way of being ‘gay’, and one way of being ‘receptive’ towards homosexuality, that ought to cut across all ages and cultures, world without end. Thus it goes without saying that there was nothing even the slightest bit homoerotic about the whole ‘overtly macho ethos’ of the Cedar Tavern setup, all those fabulous photos of de Kooning and Pollock in tight white t-shirts, the intense male friendships, the drunken bar-room brawls and equally passionate reconciliations, the sporadic misogyny or, it’s got to be said, the so-vigorous-it-might-almost-be-hiding-something anti-gay rhetoric — at least not in the remarkably literal-minded, uncomplicated, irony-free model of human sexuality, and for that matter human interaction more generally, postulated by Alice Goldfarb Marquis and her ilk.

Or, well, maybe American critics had other problems with Bacon’s paintings — not all of them unjustified, either?

You made me love you (I didn’t want to do it)
There’s a reason why I’m belabouring this slightly. It comes back to this business of Clem-bashing. As mentioned above, Tinterow’s essay makes much of the fact — those of a sensitive disposition may wish to start drawing in scare-quotes at this point — that Abstract Impressionism’s arch-arbiter elegantiae wasn’t over-keen on Bacon’s work.

The simple fact of Greenberg’s presumed omnipotent authority makes this failure on his part particularly culpable. Early on, Greenberg is damned for mentioning Bacon

only very late, and then only to repeat clichés, condescendingly lamenting his ‘inspired safe taste’, the ‘precious curiousity of our period’; an English artist, typically concerned with the Sublime, whose talent did not match his ambition.

Having long since been inducted into the useful mysteries of out-of-context quotation (I do have a PhD, remember), this was provocation enough to seek out Greenberg’s remarks in all their malign, tardy, cliché-infested, condescending formalist bigotry — although not before stopping to work out that Bacon’s work was shown twice in New York in the 1950s, apparently attracting little notice, and only once in the 1960s prior to the 1968 Guggenheim Retrospective. A heresy occurred to me. Whisper it softly, but given that even in the blighted wastes of New York there surely must have been paintings of at least marginal interest available for viewing at the time, was it really surprising that Greenberg wasn’t writing nonstop about a painter whose work he could hardly have seen?

On the other hand, when I finally dug out my copy of Clement Greenberg’s Collected Essays and Criticism: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969 (in the current climate it’s almost remarkable that one’s allowed to own such a thing without a licence, or at the very least, a proper degree in art history) I was even more surprised at what I found.

Of course I knew the ‘precious curiosity’ phrase — frankly, the reason it had stuck in my mind was because it had a degree of bite. But here — it’s a long quotation, but I want to show the full context of the phrases that Tinterow cherry-picked — are the relevant passages from an interview in January 1968 between Edward Lucie-Smith and Greenberg. Having praised Anthony Caro, Greenberg has just pronounced Henry Moore a ‘minor artist’. He goes on:

Bacon and Moore share the capacity to impose oneself. Their work has presence — a treacherous quality because it is so evanescent. Colin MacInnes wrote in his text for the catalogue of Tim Soctt’s show at the Whitechapel that the trouble with Moore was that his stuff said right off that you were in the presence of a masterpiece. It’s able to say that — for the time being — because it meets your expectations of what ‘big’ modern art should look like. Tony Smith’s sculpture does the same thing — and Smith’s success is the fastest big success I’ve yet witnessed on the American art scene. Which is ominous. There are similar reasons for the speed of Bacon’s success.

I tend to like Moore most when he’s most modest. Bacon is a different question. He’s not really as good a painter as Moore is a sculptor [Greenberg has just said that Moore is a minor artist], yet he interests me much more at this time. I go for his things at the same time that I see through and around them. It’s as though I can watch him putting his pictures together — which doesn’t stop them from getting to me. In others I behold the cheapest, coarsest, least felt application of paint matter I can visualize, along with the most transparent, up-to-date devices — but I shouldn’t say ‘others’: I see all this in every picture of his I know of since the early fifties, in the ones that hook me as well as the ones that don’t. Bacon is the one example of inspired [italics in original] safe taste — taste that’s inspired in the way in which it searches out the most up-to-date of your ‘rehearsed responses’. Some day, if I live long enough, I’ll look back on Bacon’s art as a precious curiousity of our period. In the meantime I’m caught in the same period. Actually, I enjoy it: I mean I enjoy being taken in as long as I know I’m being taken in.

There’s a good deal more in the paragraphs that follow, including what Greenberg actually says about the Sublime, a fascinating set of pronouncements about ‘Englishness in taste’ — ‘English neatness, English patness’ — plus a dig at the English emphasis on the pictorial that may well be aimed at Bacon, and much else besides, but if you’re enjoying this sudden and unanticipated effusion of greatness into my blogging, you’d almost certainly be better off buying the actual book.

Here, though, is Greenberg’s other pronouncement about Bacon, from April 1968 — in other words, still before the Guggenheim retrospective — in a review of an international exhibition in Dublin:

Bacon was represented by two fair-sized paintings of 1967 that had the impact of ‘big’ art, and on my first walk through the show they came forward in a way that put most things around them in the shade. But they somehow began to wilt when directly contemplated. The discrepancy between impact and substance in Bacon does not althogether compromise his art — at least not yet — but it does make him something less than the major artist he [italics in the original] presents himself as being.

Lines like this should be a solvent to the notion that Greenberg was in any sense a doctrinaire critic, as the whole drama of this passage lies in the conflict between Greenberg’s immediate response to the work, and his more considered judgement on it — a lesser critic might have collapsed this into a single lapidary judgement, but Greenberg is relaxed about letting the process show, which is part of his greatness. More to the point, though, in the current context — does any of this constitute a ‘lament’, let alone a ‘condescending’ one? Or to put it even more starkly, to what degree is Greenberg actually wrong here?

Personally, I don’t think he’s wrong at all — the concerns he raises regarding Bacon remain legitimate ones. And when it comes right down to it, I suspect that Tinterow suppressed these actual quotations for a simple, discreditable reason, which it that the observations still make a lot of sense — perhaps too much sense.

Yet by the same token, the nervousness of that introductory essay mandates that, no matter how raw and immediate our encounter with Bacon is meant to be, that encounter should take place in the context of Bacon’s self-evident greatness, not in the context of cool-headed critical evaluation. For that way, remember, lies cliche-ridden dogma, homophobia, and who knows what unspeakable evils beside. We’re here to admire, to shudder deliciously perhaps, and perhaps also to feel privileged to have seen what we are seeing, but certainly not to think too much, or at any rate too critically.

Retrospective doubts
There is, self-evidently, a built-in problem with retrospectives at places like Tate Britain — and I don’t just mean the refulgent oddity of a merchandising department that comes up with ideas like this one, either. The mere fact of staging this sort of event — the fearsome economics, the logistics, the long-term planning — only make sense if the artist in question is very great indeed, a suitable candidate for institutional apotheosis. And yet nearby, the permanent collection — always slightly neglected, jostled around periodically in various BP-funded rehangs, subjected to critical fancies and fads that alter with the weather, largely empty last Monday morning — seems somehow reproachful. Setting a standard for skill, learning, energy, conviction and the capacity to endure, they lurk disregarded as the crowds surge elsewhere. Like a silent jury of the dead called to pass sentence on the taste of the living, they remind us of our proper responsibilities. And first amongst these must be a responsibility to battle through all the hype, the advertising on the sides of buses and the cosy broadsheet reviews, and to be honest about what it is that Bacon could, and could not, do.

For whatever else he may have been, Bacon was a painter of formidable limitations, not all of which he eventually turned to his own advantage.

Drawing comparisons
First and foremost, to make a deeply unfashionable point, the lack of any formal art education left Bacon — his gifts for tonal relationships, surface effects and a burgler’s instrumental grasp of art history notwithstanding — notably inept when it came to indicating depth, depicting the human form, or for that matter creating compositions of sophistication or complexity. He could render bodies with flair, yes, and with a fluidity that had more to do with bravery than skill — but not with anatomical certainty, and it showed. Just as Sutherland’s portraits so often lack hands because Sutherland wasn’t any good at painting hands, and just as Freud’s subjects recline because he isn’t any good at depicting load-bearing human legs, so the figures in Bacon’s paintings often end rather suddenly, joints crop up in places more surprising than convincing, while body-parts fail to assert any sort of logical spacial relationship, rendering them depthless or worse. The explicit orthagonals of the cages didn’t always compensate for this, any more than did the Bauhaus-style furniture or the arbitrary arrows that cropped up later, pointing to nothing but a lack of technical competence. As the shorthand phrase goes, Bacon couldn’t draw.

Bacon, of course, knew he couldn’t draw. Indeed, being Bacon, he attempted to make a virtue of the fact, although — as with absolutely everything Bacon ever said in any context — once one’s scrubbed the irony from his utterances, there isn’t always much left underneath. (Readers who’re bothered about such things should also note that the famous interviews with David Sylvester were endlessly edited and re-written, not only by Sylvester himself but by Valerie Beston, too, with the result that they’re not much more reliable, as historical texts, than the garbled recollections of some long-time habitue of the Coach & Horses.) At the same time, in his conversations with other painters, he was insatiable in his curiosity about how particular technical effects were achieved, picking away at information and then flying off with it, as sharp-eyed and shameless as a magpie. But like a magpie, all he could carry were sparkling trinkets. More serious knowledge continued to elude him, and it showed.

Already, though, I hear hollow, scornful laughter rising from the blogosphere. For how can I possibly fail to realise that Bacon was up to more, so very much more than mere literal-minded representation? How can I fail to see that all those deformations and mutilations packed such a powerful charge, both in expressive and emotive terms? Since I know that he drew (except for a short phase in the 1950s) from photos rather than live models, preferred electrical light to natural light, and found his audience from amongst a world long habituated to real-life images drawn from Auschwitz, Hiroshima and atrocities too numerous to list, what on earth do I expect from Bacon — idealised, academic nudes? Well, the truth is, that of course I know all those things, but that the same time, I’m certain that, as with Sutherland and Freud, he’d have been freer with the illusionism had it fallen within his range. And if one wants to compare him with the two living artists about whom he ever had anything positive to say — Picasso and Giacometti — then the lack of skill starts to weigh rather heavily.

It’s certainly there in the work. Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours (from Muybridge) (1961) is a striking painting, but for me, at any rate, the depiction of the child’s feet (the near one a sort of glib blob, the far one simply having vanished, perhaps discouraged by whatever’s going on with the knee, or lack of knee, above) is simply an annoyance — if I owned this painting I’d absolutely itch to re-do that passage, which speaks so much more clearly of the painter’s deficiencies than it does of the child’s, or the human condition’s, or whatever it is that we’re meant to be contemplating as we stand before it. By the same token, Study for Portrait II (after the Life Mask of William Blake) (1955) is slightly too clearly ‘after a photo of the Life Mask of William Blake’, whatever the title might claim to the contrary, as, for all the putrescent glamour of the paint — the whippy little stroke that makes the nearer eye is as magical as the de Kooning equivalent would be — there’s a deformed two-dimensionality about it where, surely, a decayed three-dimensionality would have hit harder? But how would one achieve that if one’s lexicon of technical tricks didn’t run that far?

These deficiencies are, we should remember, relative. If, next to Picasso, Bacon’s technical skill was pathetically limited, it remains the case that compared to most of the living artists whose work turns up in Tate Britain these days — Ofili, Emin, Hume & Co., that is, although certainly not Freud, Auerbach or Caro — he towers like a colossus.

The second time as farce
Apologists for Damien Hirst often appeal to Bacon’s shade, seeking some worthy John the Baptist to prefigure their ageing Messiah. And of course there were, and are, affinities. Bacon was, it seems, the first British artist to merit waiting lists at galleries, very high prices at auction within his own lifetime, and the creation of an exploitative and worthless diffusion range of merchandise (the machine-printed photo-lithographs of Bacon’s paintings issued by Marlborough have about as much merit as ‘works of art’ as the photos in a cheaply-printed monograph do). Bacon, for his part, found positive things to say about Hirst, although to what extent these were playful, ironic or purely intended to shock remains unclear — conversation was, for Bacon, quite clearly an art form, for which invention was as crucial as evasion. And Hirst’s vision of how an artist should behave is clearly a debased, dumbed-down version of the folk-tale version of Bacon, just as his vitrines could be read as a debased, dull replication of Bacon’s ethereal ‘cages’.

But then there are the differences, which matter more. For all his ineptitude, Bacon was at least seeking to work within a tradition of painting in oils that stretched back through van Gogh to Velazquez, Grünewald and beyond; serious about very little else, Bacon did at least take painting entirely seriously, to the extent that even the demands of his more-than-frequent, half-cut conviviality were not allowed to intrude on it. He made things himself, got his hands dirty, grappled physically as well as intellectually with his paintings, relished the problems of using paint to produce the effects he wanted, even when he wasn’t very good at it. The result is that even the least effective Bacons, the ones that are formulaic and flat, still have a degree of real emotive force that Hirst’s work can never match. Hirst, in contrast, has said, in reference to why he didn’t actually paint his own spot paintings, ‘I couldn’t be fucking arsed doing it’. And that shows, too. Or to put it another way, Bacon’s work has aquired a reputation for slick, amoral bleakness that Hirst’s more truly reserves.

So it came as a shock to realise, in the Tate retrospective, that Bacon’s marvellous 1933 Crucifixion is in fact owned by Hirst himself. Am I alone in finding this alarming? The painting is a rare survivor from Bacon’s pre-1945 oeuvre, but its interest is more than that of curiousity. It’s a small work, by the older Bacon’s standards, and nearly monochome. The image, which in places produces the weird illusion of having been transmitted onto the canvas through some mysterious photographic or even biological means — like something that simply happened, rather than something that was done, although in other places the stuttering trail of the loaded brush is just as apparent — resembles some malformed small animal subjected to an X-ray, but at the same time evokes, as the title suggests, a crucifixion, or indeed an outraged spatchcocked ghost.

The 1933 Crucifixion is, in other words, one of those strange works that would seem to reflect perfectly one strand of reaction to the atrocities of the Second World War, had it not been painted a good five years before that war began. What on earth can Hirst, with his advertising man’s literal-mindedness, his absolute lack of subtlety or evident self-doubt, see in a work like this? Doubtless we shall soon enough find it floating in a vitrine, or sliced apart by studio assistants only to be re-assembled in some deeply banal decorative pattern. Well, at least I’ve seen it now. That’s something.

Always look on the black side of life
Bacon was, for all this, limited in more than just his technical ability. His range was narrow, too.

For isn’t range — the ability to do more than one thing well, to capture more than one emotion or mood, to change gear and speed and traction yet still remain convincing — part of what we expect when we look for ‘greatness’ in art? Velazquez, for instance, could do everything from military pictures to heart-melting portraits of young princesses to still-lives of ordinary bottles containing in that portrayal more life than most painters manage to inject into the busiest urban crowd scenes. His kings don’t look like his abbesses, or his generals, or his saints. Titian, in the course of a long life, expressed everything from coolly Apollonian order to the most debauched and messy of Dionysian revels, everything from melting maternal love to sexual sadism explicit enough to make Bacon seem frankly tame. Rembrandt could paint crucifixions just as reliably as erotic scenes, or portraits of subjects high and low — in a tone declamatory and theatrical or intimate and homely. It wasn’t always darkness and carnage in Goya’s work, any more than it was always picnics en plain air in the world of Manet. And so on, and so on.

One could, in fact, play this game all day, eventually getting around to Picasso who, for all his faults, came up with enough good ideas (as well as enough bad ones) to furnish the imaginations of lesser painters for decades to come. Or, venturing further down the slopes of Mount Olympus, one could turn to the examples of other twentieth century British painters — Sickert, Orpen, Bomberg, Ben Nicholson, Auerbach — in search of more variety, in terms of mood as much as stylistic and technical development.

Bacon, however, pulls up short at this hurdle. Bacon’s paintings may look different, and some are more successful than others, but they virtually never feel different.

True, there was a brief phase during 1956-57 when extensive travel — Monte Carlo and the South of France, Tangiers and South Africa — somehow prodded Bacon into producing a handful of pictures that hardly look like ‘Bacons’ at all. The catalogue dismisses them as ‘cul-de-sacs’ — Lawrence Alloway called them ‘an outburst from a gypsy violin’, an evocative assessment presumably not meant as praise — but nonetheless they remain some of the most arresting, exciting works in the show. Not least, they are the only pictures in which Bacon fights free of his normal tendency to parachute some figure or incident into the centre of a big flat plain, either of colour or blackness, brushed in without great engagement, so that all the emphasis is on the centre and none on the periphery. In Study for Portrait of Van Gogh VI (1957), for instance, there’s actually a strong composition — a sort of off-centre Y-shape down which a landscape pours as if into a drain, spilling into a sea of green-marbled cadmium red below — meaning that for once, painterly energy animates the whole picture. The mood is different, too — not happy, exactly, but at least genuinely enlivening, in a way that the inertly voyeuristic pessimism of most other works surely is not. In other words, had Bacon taken more risks of this sort, he might have proved, in some sense, to be a greater artist. As it was, at the risk of being perverse just for the sake of it, if this phase was a cul-de-sac, I only wish Bacon had left the main road with its unvarying, monotonous scenery and moved in here for good.

For there’s a problem with striking only one note, or at any rate notes in only one key, throughout a long career, which is that doing so necessarily restricts the scope of an artist’s appeal. And however one wants to characterise the nature of Bacon’s vision — and I want to discuss this further in a moment, again because I’m not sure the conventional account is entirely correct — it’s clear that there is a particularly Baconian view of the human condition, or at least a mood or tone, that’s consistent throughout his oeuvre.

So, in effect, we must choose between a finite sense of responses in front of a Bacon painting. First, there are those who believe that the account of the world Bacon offers is an accurate, ‘realistic’ and hence admirable one. Second, there are those who are engaged, more or less consciously, in what economists call preference falsification — those who feel that they ought to find Bacon’s account of the world admirable, perhaps because in claiming to do so they wish to say something more impressive about their own modernity, lack of sentimentality and clarity of vision than would have been the case if, say, they admitted a guilty enthusiasm for the worlds of Munnings, Lavery or Rex Whistler. Third, I suppose, are the people who find it possible to look at Bacon’s work purely in formal terms, detaching it as they do so from all considerations of subject-matter, literary or art-historical references, sexuality, politics or morality. And then there are those who, for a variety of reasons, find Bacon’s account of the world deficient, partial, limited, inaccurate or downright malign.

A Fuller critique
We may be confident in giving Peter Fuller pride of place in the last of these groups. In the very first issue of his unparallelled, much-missed Modern Painters, Fuller himself provided a fascinating comparison of the careers of Francis Bacon and Graham Sutherland, offered up as much in the spirit of an editorial credo as an allegorical account of the relationship between art, society and morality.

The article, printed in the spring of 1988, was called ‘Nature and Raw Flesh’. Needless to say, Bacon comes out of it all quite badly, with his limited scope a central issue in Fuller’s denunciation of him. The entire piece is worth reading, of course, but the following must suffice as an indication of its complaint:

Bacon himself has suggested that his distortions clear away veils and screens, and reveal his subjects, ‘as they really are’. But before we assent to this, we must first go along with Bacon’s judgement on his fellow human beings. [...] There is only one aspect of human being which he attends to.

Fuller goes on to draw an inspired comparison with Reynolds’ portraits, which famously rejected the ‘psychologically revealing portrait’ in favour of ‘edifying idealisation’.

Manifestly, Bacon does not idealise: but, in a similarly universal way, he denigrates [italics in original]. It really does not matter whose likeness he exploits: their face will emerge as that of ‘a gross and cruel monster’ [the reference here is to Churchill's outraged description of Graham Sutherland's portrait of him, later destroyed] ‘and nothing else‘. For Bacon, and individual’s face is no more than an injured cypher for his own sense of the irredeemable baseness of man.

This leads Fuller, eventually, to this final judgement:

Bacon’s numerous critical supporters have repeatedly insisted that he is a great ‘realist’ who paints the world as it is. Michel Leiris has recently argued that Bacon ‘cleanses’ art ‘both of its religious halo and its moral dimension’. Bacon himself has said that his paintings can offend, because they deal with ‘facts, or what used to be called truth’. Yet Bacon is indifferent to particular truths concerning the appearance, and character, of his subjects. No one could accuse him of being a respecter of persons: in his view, men and women are raw and naked bags of muscle and gut, capable only of momentary spasmodic activity.

‘Realism’ in art inevitably involves the selective affirmation of values. Whether one accepts Bacon as a ‘realist’ or not will depend upon whether one shares his particular view of humanity. Bacon is an artist of persuasive power and undeniable ability; but he has used his expressive skills to denigrate and to degrade. He presents on aspect of the human condition as necessary and universal truth.

Ultimately, for Fuller, Bacon’s ‘tendentious vision’ demands not only a ‘moral response’, but also ‘a refusal’. Yet the paradox of this stunning polemic was, of course, that, far from eliciting ‘refusals’, the critical response to Bacon’s vision was, in 1988, one of near-universal, respectful, open-armed acquiescence.

Who’s afraid of Francis Bacon?
That was twenty years ago. Bacon was still painting. David Sylvester was still publishing. Mrs Thatcher was still prime minister, and seemed likely to remain so for some time. The organising narrative of the Cold War was still present-tense and functional. The world was, in all sorts of ways, a different place. So it’s probably unsurprising that, my enormous regard for Ruskin’s greatest modern disciple notwithstanding, my own rejection of Bacon’s ‘realism’ took shape along different lines.

It comes down, ultimately, to this question of horror. One of the many things that ‘everyone knows’ about Francis Bacon is that his paintings are horrific. It’s almost impossible to mention Bacon out in the real world without running up against this certainty. ‘Car-crash cardinals’ was the neat phrase with which a friend of mine dismissed Bacon’s oeuvre, while an acquaintance was shocked at the thought that anyone might be so irresponsible as to let a young child look at a fully-illustrated Bacon monograph. More than once, in an attempt to contain the grisly reality of my own doctoral viva voce exam by shrink-wrapping it in rhetoric, I’ve described the whole experience as being ‘like taking part in a Francis Bacon painting,’ a remark invariably greeted with sympathetic nods of recognition. For this is the perfection of Fuller’s ‘injured cypher’ comment — Bacon’s become such a by-word for horror that we no longer have to see the real paintings, to have direct knowledge of them, in order to recognise the meanings that his very name now encodes.

How fair is this, though? In a world in which the 24 hour rolling news regularly serves up to us actual — if mediated, edited and sanitised — blood-smeared pavements sparkling with broken glass, the hellishly distorted domesticity of the bombed-out apartment or rotting shanty-town, or the preludes and postscripts of famous executions with only the money-shot itself flirtatiously hidden from view — and where the internet, with an amorality beyond all understanding, really does provide access to pretty much every form of evil that one might previously have assumed, or perhaps even hoped, to be literally ‘unimaginable’ — what on earth can ‘horror’ really mean, in visual terms? The point’s important enough, I think, to allow yet another apparent detour.

Facing facts
One artist who always seems to me to have some sort of relationship with Bacon — no less important for being so indirect and in some sense adversarial — is Henry Tonks. Tonks is, it seems, hardly a household name even amongst those who take an interest in twentieth century British war art, while for those who do know him, he’s sometimes written off as an anachronism — a long-time teacher at the Slade who attempted to impose the duller lessons of French Impressionism on generations of otherwise progressive young English art students. Between 1916 and 1918, however, Tonks, a trained surgeon as well as a trained artist, worked at Aldershot and the Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup, documenting facial injuries received in combat — the wounds, the surgery, the end result. Tonks brought to this task a mixture of academic objectivity, illusionistic skill, painterly flair and evident moral alertness that makes these images at once unforgettable, yet at the same something one might be glad indeed to forget, so hard is it to view what are, in effect, elegant salon portraits of men whose faces no longer make any sense, people who are neverthless no longer recognisably human.

Self-evidently, Tonks is worth remembering today more than ever, at a time when so many young men, in Britain and Canada and the USA as well as other parts of the world, are sustaining appalling, life-changing injuries, yet are far too often hidden away by a culture that quite literally cannot look them in the face. Stories like this one show the attitudes limbless servicemen confront when they venture out in public — little wonder that those who experience serious facial wounds very often end up facing greater challenges from their own mental health than from the physical consequences of their injuries. Part of the problem, I guess, that those of us with still-undamaged faces would simply rather not acknowledge that these things do happen, or to consider how we’d cope if the object of all this disgust, fear and denial was in fact not some poor damaged freakish ‘victim’ — not someone to be pitied then swiftly forgotten — but the face in the mirror staring back at us.

Back to Tonks, however, and his relationship with Bacon. It says something, I think, that when I was seeking to find an online image of one of Tonks’ facial injury portraits in order to illustrate how really shockingly hard to bear they are, I came up with — absolutely nothing. Not a single thing.

All of which goes to prove, however obliquely, how easy it is to append that the word ‘horror’ to Bacon, yet how little it really signifies. For the difference between Tonks’ images and Bacon’s is one not of degree, but rather of kind. Both men were painters, and both created ‘works of art’. While, however, Tonks’ portraits achieve a terrible clinical veracity, bringing us up again and again against the shocking truth of some gravely damaged, individual human life, Bacon’s images in effect do the precise opposite.

For despite all Bacon’s claims that his goal was to act directly upon the nervous system — to offer up ‘reality’ in order to evoke the same responses reality does — even the laziest viewer must grasp, however unconsciously, that what’s acting upon the nervous system is art, not life itself. And indeed, this is another feature of Bacon’s framing devices — their reassuring contextualisation of the thing we see before us. It’s there in the gold frames, the glass, the ‘cages’, the ’shuttering’, the art-conscious titles with their ‘triptychs’ and ’studies’ and ‘figures’, the abundant and normalising references to culture high or low. Relax, dear, it’s only a painting!

As reliably as the hackneyed narrative conventions of the low-budget slasher film, in any event framed by the edge of the screen and hence discontinous with real life, Bacon’s horror comes to us mediated by its clear aesthetic purpose. Or to put it another way, one simply doesn’t, even in these debased times, feel the same way about a pool of blood on the pavement as depicted by Francis Bacon as one does about a real pool of blood, encountered on some Soho street-corner amid the cheerfully companionable squalour of a busy Saturday night. If you’re looking for horror, in other words, whether psychic or physical or metaphysical, there are more promising destinations than Tate Britain, such as, well, pretty much anywhere in the actual world around us.

It’s also worth adding that Bacon, for one, didn’t think his paintings were horrible, at least not in any uncomplicated sense. In one of his many interviews with David Sylvester, he made this quite clear:

I’ve never known why my paintings are known as horrible. I’m always labelled with horror, but I never think about horror. Pleasure is such a diverse thing. And horror is too. Can you call the famous Isenheim altar a horror piece? It’s one of the greatest paintings of the Crucifixion, with the body studded with thorns like nails, but oddly enough the form is so grand it takes away from the horror. But that is the horror in the sense that it is so vitalising; isn’t that how people came out of the great tragedies? People came out as though purged into happiness, into a fuller reality of existence.

This, to my mind anyway, opens up as much moral ambivalence in Bacon’s ‘horror’ as it ought to do (but seldom does) in that of Titian, Goya or Picasso. Admittedly, the fact that some very great artists have found quite a lot to enjoy in images of pain, violence and sexualised violation may not seem reassuring. To deny it, though, or alternatively to find it very distasteful, is to ignore something important about the nature of art itself. Whatever else art may be — whatever else art should be — it should never be confused with reality.

Another heresy?
A full discussion of the matter of Bacon’s ‘militant’ atheism — another one of those things that ‘everyone’ knows about Bacon, with the result that I’m instinctively suspicious of it — must wait until another day.

Suffice to say that while Bacon often claimed that he didn’t believe in God, I do rather wonder whether he may have been one of those people thrown up now and then by powerfully protestant backgrounds — and growing up in Ireland at the time that he did, Bacon’s protestantism could never have been insignificant, even if it played itself out in a conscious retreat from sectarian identification — who in fact do, at some level, believe in God, heaven and hell, but at the same time are absolutely certain, in a way that no mere atheist ever could never be, of the absolute impossibility of their own, ultimate salvation. To me, this fits with other well-documented aspects of Bacon’s personality — the ambivalence regarding authority and morality, the masochism, the terrible combination of flippancy and absolutely authentic despair with which he addressed the subject of death — than any other solution, and makes more sense of the Crucifixions, popes and so forth, too.

For I don’t for a moment believe Bacon when he claimed that his obsession with the Crucifixion was purely formal:

The central figue of Christ is raised into a very pronounced and isolated position, which gives it, from a formal point of view, greater possibilities than having all the different figures placed on the same level.

This is patently nonsense — for all his compositional ham-fistedness, even Bacon must have realised that there are other ways to raise elements of a composition other than nailing them to a tree in first century Palestine, while in fact virtually none of Bacon’s Crucifixion pictures include a raised, isolated subject in the manner Bacon describes. Am I alone, I wonder, in thinking that sometimes Bacon came up with these things simply to see how much idiocy his interlocutors would swallow?

No, it’s easy enough to come up with a list of reasons why Bacon might have settled on the Crucifixion as a central theme in his work. For one, it’s a sure-fire signifier of art-historical seriousness and authority, for to tackle this subject is, implicitly, to set oneself in direct competition with some of the greatest artists of the Western tradition: not just Grünewald, but Tintoretto, Mantegna, Giotto, etc, etc, the list really is virtually endless, and clearly one of the things that Bacon had learned from Picasso is that arrogance of this kind is a gamble that sometimes pays off. And for all I know, the psycho-sexual resonances of this most visually conventional form of torture may have fascinated Bacon for other reasons, too. His claim that he painted to excite himself makes more sense to me than most of his quoted remarks.

But at the risk of uttering a perversity even more appalling than any of my previous ones, I also wonder whether Bacon’s use of the ‘Crucifixion’ label — as with his employment of triptychs for some of the most personal works he ever painted — wasn’t, in fact, both an explicit statement that God was dead, and yet, at the same time, something almost like a prayer, silent certainly and quite possibly unwilling, that God might, at some point, rise and rule again? That pain might somehow prove to be redemptive, that this corruptible — ‘corruption’ a concept so much in earthy, pungent evidence in most of Bacon’s paintings — might someday put on incorruption? That even the impenitent thief might, somehow, be saved?

For despite all his defects, almost too well-publicised, it takes a very partial reading of Bacon’s life — perhaps of his art as well — to conclude that he was, personally, without compassion, kindness, affection, generosity, pity or even what might, in different times, have been called a sense of moral responsibility. And of course there are ironies in the fact that the painter of the Screaming Popes, the habitual blasphemer and amoralist, chose to die — meekly, and apparently with admirably good manners — in a Spanish hospital run by a Dominican order of nuns called the Sisters of Mary.

Sometimes, contemplating Bacon’s life, I am reminded of that frankly distressing Kipling story, Ba Ba Black Sheep, and in particular, of the passage right at the very end, where the little boy — abused, brutalised, but now at least returned to the care of his adoring if ineffectual mother — jumps in puddles, just to show that no matter how bad he tries to be, the result will never be anything other than love, understanding and forgiveness. Was this somehow Bacon’s world, albeit — for there was a strand of romanticism in Bacon that surely deemed it must always be so — minus the semi-happy ending?

But can I see it out of the frame, please?
All of which leaves me back in Tate Britain, drifting back and forth between those ten big rooms with their stark white walls and high white ceilings, trying to make sense of the thoughts swirling round in my head, dizzying like the multiple reflections flashing off the surface of all the big pictures, vivid like the cadmium orange and bright green lake, as luridly inchoate as the forms writhing, fighting or fucking, the raw slabs of meat and scrubby brushwork, the blurs and the simulated, coagulated blood.

The Francis Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain is, at the very least, a powerful experience. The effect of seeing so many large, important works by Bacon, all in one place, is a very different one from seeing his pictures scattered amongst other pictures, one by one, the weak pictures more abundant than the strong ones. It certainly brings home some truths about Bacon’s oeuvre. There are, for instance, some dazzlingly beautiful passages of painting — the teeth in Head II (1949), the mouth in Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne (1966), and indeed quite a lot of Figures in a Landscape (1956-57). There is also some woeful and culpable laziness — the childish daubs of purple in Head VI (1949), the do-nothing dead-looking backgrounds in works like Triptych – In Memory of George Dyer (1971) — as well as a tendency to trade on some combination of ’scandalous’ subject-matter, technical tricks that feel mannered or mechanical, and the inherited cultural authority of large-scale, elaborately-framed painting in oils.

And there’s a narrowness of vision that, after a while, starts to seem as irksome as those fictive cages. If Bacon was to any degree a great painter, then his was a notably narrow greatness. No wonder he worked so hard, constantly, to create and foster and defend his reputation. No wonder the curators here seemed nervous in some of their strategies, defensive in others. Bacon’s notorious life, his extant work and his posthumous reputation remain precariously balanced against each other, holding more or less stable for the moment. Yet a collapse seems possible. It may be that we need that little ‘Archive’ room at the centre of the exhibition in order to animate surfaces elsewhere that would otherwise degenerate into period-pieces, personal indulgences, an ornate and protracted footnote to the life of Picasso which appears only, of course, in the English-language editions. In other words, I’m not so sure that Greenberg’s ‘precious curiosity’ prophesy won’t come true, in our lifetimes, perhaps, if apparently not in his own.

Nor, however, was Greenberg wrong in his splendid honesty when he admitted that Bacon’s paintings did, for all their limitations, have a special quality about them. Having spent an hour or two in those rooms with them, pondering on my doubts and reservations regarding them, they nonetheless made an undeniable, concrete impact.

No, it isn’t all hype, fame and framing. It can’t be. Bacon’s art does indeed have, for all that much-alleged horror, something vastly attractive about it, seductive even — a genuinely persuasive quality, one of the touch-stones of good art anywhere. What we are seeing, immersed in Bacon’s vision, at least radiates personal authenticity, a deeply-felt, marginally compusive quality. We are, in other words, as far from the arch ironic cynicism of a Hirst here as we are from the repellent mechanistic glibness of a Currin, or the attention-seeking opportunism of a Marcus Harvey, or indeed from pretty much anything, I suspect, here. For all his bleakness, for all his pessimism, and for everything Greenberg said about his ‘cheap, coarse’, unfelt application of paint, Bacon for some reason — and perhaps this is the biographical birthmark he always managed to hide from the rest of us — invested the vast reserves of a strong, charismatic, truculent yet charming personality in the production of his art. Painting really did, I think, matter to him. And it shows.

To his personal obsessions he brought not only the ‘inspired safe taste’ that Greenberg identified, but also an unerring instinct for exactly those images that could bear the weight of expressive responsibility his work enforced upon them. Objects really do take on a different meaning after a few hours immersed in Bacon’s vision. Last week was a sporadically rainy one in London, but in the wake of the Bacon show, every single opened black umbrella dripping with rain and reflected light seemed at once more significant, ominous and vivid than ever before. Advertisements for teeth-whitening suddenly mesmerised me, as I sat reading the Evening Standard early in the evening, with the full force of their grinning, grimacing menace. Dogs looked different. So did meat. So did chairs, especially isolated ones. And so did those things one sometimes can’t quite make out on the periphery of one’s early morning vision.

Something had, in other words, been shared, some shard of fertile blackness planted by Bacon in my eyes and gut, which — until familiarity melted it, which is probably just as well — made me see things his way for a while. I don’t want to be too literal about this — the best abstract painters achieve this as reliably as the best figurative ones, conferring briefly upon experience a certain quality of light, a sensitivity to the shimmering three dimensionality of things, even just a kind of nervous alertness — but lesser artists simply don’t.

There’s no question, at a personal level, that time spent in the company of relentless negativity, apparent amorality and ostentatious gleeful heartlessness not only has a corrosive effect, but will eventually come to seem as numbingly dull as it is ultimately unrewarding. No, I’ve never really wanted to own a Bacon painting. At that level, Peter Fuller was right, too. But there’s a paradoxical sense in which exposure to Bacon’s vision in fact reminds one how much there is around it, outside of it, in spite of it. If I left Tate Britain neither horrified nor depressed, but in fact mildly elated, this was surely the reason. At his very best, when his heart was really in the making of it, Bacon’s art is beautiful despite itself — and then one comes out of the gallery, into the natural daylight, and the world feels new again — cleansed almost, and strangely full of hope.

Francis Bacon is at Tate Britain from 11 September 2008. Afterwards the exhibition will travel first to the Prado (Madrid, Spain) and thereafter to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City, USA).

The last few years have seen a deep questioning of the central tenets of the theory of secularisation. Far from growing less religious, as the prophets of the post-war period supposed to be our destiny, the world has become more infused with religious attitudes than ever. It is now intellectually respectable, if not yet fully intelligible,  to talk and write about a ‘post-secular’ age. At the same time it is possible to re-examine the high points of the supposedly nonreligious era we have now passed beyond, and see it anew as the site and source of an intense and distinctive spirituality.  It is strange for an art collection like the Methodist Church’s Collection of Modern Christian Art to have almost no abstract works in the collection, as though properly religious art could only ever be representational. Yet until recently abstract art was regarded by many religious people as at the vanguard of a world without form, without meaning, and  – ultimately – without God. If non-representational art was somehow non-traditional then it was also, so it was feared, non-religious. It is possible now, however to reappraise this view.

In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s Patrick Heron produced a large number of canvases in acrylics and prints on paper, based on bright, interlocking abstract shapes. As though to forestall the possibility of overlooking the artist’s obsession with colour, they had titles such as ‘Blue and deep violet with orange brown and green’.
The following reflections were inspired by a painting of Patrick Heron’s at the Tate, which is typical of his work at that time. Perhaps to emphasise its abstract qualities it is titled January 1973:14.

1.
what makes this image seem alive? Something to do with the way our eyes insist on bringing some colours to the foreground and some to the background. It just happens, we can’t help it. Is it about what the colours are, or about what we are, in a phenomenological sense? Patrick Heron was fascinated by the rejection of illusory depth exhibited by American abstract expressonists. He explored it obsessively and in many respects went beyond it. For Heron this was a formal question in art theory, but it can also be said to have religious implications – the relationship between what is ‘out there’ and how we perceive it.

2.
‘Creative emptiness’ was one of the things that attracted Patrick Heron to artists such as Rothko and de Koonig. With them, Heron challenges the viewer with ‘the troublesome subject’. If it is not about figuration, what is the painting about? What is the point? Don’t these non-representational shapes want us to make something of them? Don’t some have their backs to one another? Don’t some encompass others, or offer enclosure, and others interlock? (Critics call these his ‘jigsaw paintings’). Rothko denied that his work was abstract, and  Patrick Heron repeatedly noted that no work can be entirely abstract. When we try to pin down representation it recedes, but doesn’t entirely disappear.

Bonnard, Femme au Chat

3.

What is the relationship between the colours/shapes themselves, and why does relationship seem to be an appropriate term to use? The relationship seems really important. In the 1940s Patrick Heron wrote about the ‘alloverness’ of paintings by Bonnard and Matisse and said ‘the forms of objects in a picture…hardly exist in isolation from the total configuration’. Heron’s rigorous formalism is perhaps offputting to many, but alternatively it can be seen as a kind of framework for a deep sense of humanity.

4.
Why do different parts of the painting seem to evoke different feelings or moods? There’s meaning, but there isn’t… but there is. Patrick Heron, who was a notable art critic, said when he visited Australia in 1973, ‘What one was looking for… was a full emptiness , or an empty fullness’, and I think this comes to the point. In my view a case can be made that Heron is recording in art something quite close to the philosophy of the Buddhist Heart Sutra, with its well-known formulation, ‘form is emptiness, emptiness form’. This emptiness, sunyata, has been taken by much western philosophy to be a version of nihilism (as Roger-Pol Droit critiques in The Cult of Nothingness). But for Heron, the emptiness amounts to an entirely interconnected plenitude – it is a full emptiness. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, ‘and what is form empty of? It is empty of separate identity’ (The Heart of Understanding, 1988. See 3, above).

5.
Looking at Patrick Heron’s abstractions, one may feel quite sure the natural world is there, neither in nor out of view, as it were. At any rate it hasn’t gone away. Heron disliked American critic Clement Greenberg’s claim that British abstract art was no more than ‘landscape imagery in disguise’, not least because Heron wanted to show in his art and criticism that Americans didn’t invent abstract expressionism as Greenberg also claimed, but that it was already a strong European tradition, and Britons such as himself could teach the Americans a thing or too. In fact he thought he had, with his seminal painting ‘Vertical Light’, for instance.

Zennor Hill

However, I think Greenberg’s point remains valid. When Heron moved to Zennor in Cornwall the environment was a great spur to his painting. Zennor was also an inspiration to D.H. Lawrence, who finished Women in Love there and wrote to John Middleon Murray and Katherine Mansfield: ‘At Zennor one sees infinite Atlantic, all peacock-mingled colours, and the gorse is sunshine itself already… when I looked down at Zennor I knew it was the promised land, and that a new heaven and a new earth would take place.’ (The Selected Letters of D.H.Lawrence, ed. James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000: 123)
Heron must have caught something of this spirit for he said ‘This is a landscape that has altered my life, the house in its setting is the source of all my painting’. He wrote to Herbert Read, another art critic: ‘I wish you could see the place in its Mediterranean brilliance of light and colour! Yesterday though, we were wreathed in mist all day: hot, steamy stuff which made the rocks and bushes into grey Chinese silhouettes…’ . It is significant that for Heron the mist turns landscape into art.
There is something in Heron’s work that is strongly reminiscent of  Zen non-representation, the sublimation of nature into art and back again, as in a Zen garden (and one could examine further Heron’s approach to scale in this context), as in the eighth ox-herding picture by Tensho Shubun at Kyoto, where all that is left of representation is an empty circle, but that is not the end of the cycle of paintings.

6.
This link is clear in the work of another Cornish artist, Trevor Bell, whom Heron the critic championed in 1958 as ‘the greatest painter under 30′. http://www.modbritart.com/media/wdmodernmedia/TB_001-048web2.pdf
According to Chris Stephens of the Tate, they were both part of a 1950s revival of the sublime in British art. What he says of Bell, could also apply to Heron: ‘ images of infinity that inevitably conjure up intimations of mortality. They are not mournful, however, for that recognition of finality and infinity is a moment of great enlightenment.’

Cezanne, Bibemus Quarry

7.

So what is the point of paying attention to paintings like these? Two quotations may illuminate this question:
“The Landscape becomes reflective, human and thinks itself through me. I make it an object, let it project itself and endure within my painting…. I become the subjective consciousness of the landscape, and my painting becomes its objective consciousness.”
Paul Cézanne, quoted in Joyce Medina, 1955 Cézanne and Modernism: The Poetics of Painting, State University of New York Press.

“I have always claimed that painting’s prime function is to dictate what the world looks like … What we imagine to be the ‘objective’ look of everything and anything is largely a complex, a weave of textures, forms and colours which we have learned, more or less unconsciously, from painting, and have superimposed upon external reality. The actual ‘objective’ appearance of things (of anything and everything) is something that does not exist…”
Patrick Heron, 1996 “Solid Space in Cézanne”, Modern Painters Vol 9 (1).

8.
It is worth reflecting not only on the work of Patrick Heron itself, but also on what happened to it. In 2004 the so-called Momart Brit Art fire destroyed 50 of Heron’s most significant works. Should we be devastated, as his daughters reportedly were? Or should we agree with Tracy Emin, some of whose key work was also turned to ash: ‘It’s only art’? Transience. See point 6.

9.
What has all this to do with Christianity? I’ve long been interested in what Buddhism has to bring to the Christian tradition. Similar to the quote above from the Heart Sutra is a statement by the ancient Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna: ‘The limits of nirvana are the limits of samsara. Between the two also there is not the slightest difference whatsoever.’ The radical theologian Don Cupitt identifies this identity of supposed opposites as part of the Christian tradition too:
‘Identity of loving God and loving one’s neighbour. Identity of faith and works. Identity of this life and eternal life. Identity of the holy and the common. Identity of perfect self-affirmation and perfect self-surrender’. (in John Lane and Maya Kumar Mitchell, eds, 2000 Only Connect,  Dartington, Devon: Green Books, p. 125)

In the ‘empty fullness’ of Patrick Heron’s art one sees the visual expression of this Buddhist-Christian identity. The identity of surface and depth, abstraction and representation, landscape (nature) and art (culture),  the impossible and the possible God. If the term ‘post-secular’ is to emerge with a meaning, it will need to do so in relation to art such as Patrick Heron’s.

Greg Costikyan wrote an article called “Death to the Games Industry” (Part 2 here) about two years ago. As much as I disagree with some of the things he says, I have to admit he’s right in this case. I read this article first around the beginning of this year or the end of last, and I had my own take on it back then. I completely disagreed. After learning a lot about the history of 20th century art, however, and analyzing the market over and over again, turning things around in my head, I’ve come to some very terrifying conclusions.

First off, let’s talk about Clement Greenberg. Clem was an art critic back in the 1950s and late into the 1980s that was known for his high praise of Abstract Expressionist art (more commonly referred to on Teh Interwebs as “Art That Doesn’t Look Like Anything”). Despite the cruel sport of “Clembashing” that has become popular over the years, reducing the critic to nothing more than a rambling old fool who couldn’t love anything more than pictures that look like nothing, Clement Greenberg was one of the most knowledgeable and insightful people of his time that helped establish a careful and precarious balance between what is “Kitsch” and what is “Avant-Garde”. He is the one who saw what no-one else seemed to be seeing: that art must be challenging the prior generation, making it, therefore, “Avant-Garde”, or “advance guard”, propelling art forward. Otherwise, it becomes “Kitsch”: easy, common, unchallenging, almost tacky in comparison. Pointless.

Now, this is especially important, because “kitsch” and “avant-garde” is not only relevant to painting. We see the same trend in literature and movies: compare a new book by Stephen King to his older works. Do you notice the difference? Back in the day, King was edgy, angry. Excited to write for a new audience, a new, darker world. Nowadays, he just releases gore on a payroll. It’s become easy, unchallenging. He’s stopped advancing. It’s the dividing line between avant-garde and kitch!

Now let’s move on to games. The problem with the games industry is that we’re starting to stagnate: to become to repetitive with our formulas. In other words, we’re becoming Kitsch. I call to the stand critically acclaimed games like Halo 3 and Soul Calibur IV. While the Halo 3 craze is slowly dying out, and more and more people admit, embarrassed, that no, Halo 3 isn’t Jesus Christ on Toast, Soul Calibur IV only came out recently and we’re still enjoying the hell out of it. I love it. I do. Personally, I enjoy it, and love it, and can’t wait to get more downloadable content so I can deck out my characters in all the armor I’m missing.

But it’s stale. It’s the same game it’s been for the past three games; don’t try to tell me about refining and balance and innovation, because I’ve heard it all before. Soul Calibur IV brings nothing new to the table, at all. You can give it stellar reviews. You can say it’s the best fighter game this year. But I can also give a restaurant five stars and say that it’s the best Italian food I’ve ever had. I can also compare two brands of soap, or hair conditioner, or soda, or furniture sets, and tell you which is better. It doesn’t mean it’s revolutionary. And here I must grudgingly concede another point to Costikyan when he says game critique is virtually nonexistant in today’s world. See, I’m not reviewing Soul Calibur IV right now. I could review it and say it’s great. Really, it is. Go buy it. But to critque art, to analyze it and to determine what was done, what was used, whether or not it’s moving forward… to determine whether it’s being avant-garde or kitsch… that’s what we need.

To elaborate on what’s avant-garde, let’s look at Portal for a moment. We all know Portal. It was stupendous. Do you know why? Yes, Glad-OS was awesome. But do you realize that you played through an entire first person shooter without actually firing any bullets? In fact, you never actually hurt anything directly, did you? Other than the Companion Cube. You jerk. But really, Valve in making Portal really challenged us to see what it could be like to play the same game we’ve played over and over again, but this time, do it in a completely differerent way. This time, we’re not going to shoot anything or anyone. This time, we’re not going to hurt people. In that same way, Mirror’s Edge might be doing exactly the same thing, really changing up the idea of what we’ve all experienced. But see, someone had to do it first. That’s avant-garde.

I wanted to disagree at first with Costik’s and my own thoughs. I mean, truly spectacular-seeming games like Heavy Rain and Little Big Planet are only on the horizon, and Fable 2 holds great promise (promises Molyneaux made for Fable 1, but we’re giving him the benefit of the doubt anyway). But we’re out of time already. Gameplay is dying. We need the industry to change fast, or it will be crushed.

Now, a lot of people thought the Wii was the savior of gameplay, and I know game designers all over were extremely enthusiastic about it. But I’ve been calling it for a while now, and nobody seems to have been listening. And now that we’re all more aware of Nintendo’s new end goal, people are walking around with their tails between their legs, and I feel awful because I was expecting it.

Here’s the thing about the Wii that people have been neglecting to think about: when you make a game focused on a new form of play, it’s revolutionary. Right? The Wii doesn’t do that; rather, it gives people the new form of play right off the bat. Therefore, most Wii games are forced designed around motion-sensing capabilities. To be blunt, every Wii game that comes out is basically just hacking off the motion sensor. Show me a Wii game that doesn’t use motion sensing technology in some fashion. It’s its only selling point! The Wiimote doesn’t open up new styles of play; it essentially incarcerates games into one hackneyed mechanic that requires little thought to implement!

Compare Portal to any new Wii title you’re looking at now. Raving Rabbids or that new Shaun White Snowboarding game. Raving Rabbids 2 actually uses the balance board as a sled function just like the Shaun White snowboarding game. And yet it’s so cheap! Anyone could have thought of that. The design requires no real challenge or thought as to how to radically change or improve a player’s experience–it’s just recieve, reprocess, repack and repeat! Whereas Portal took something people hadn’t done before and really moved the face of gaming! It’s now one of the most recognized titles on the market, acclaimed even by extremely embittered Yahtzee Croshaw, recognized internet game critic and author of the video series Zero Punctuation.

I mean, what are you going to do in Harvest Moon for the Wii? Tilt the Wiimote as if you’re watering plants? Move it up and down as if you’re cutting wood? Really? Seriously, think about it. Could it really be that hard to come up with the idea?

No.

Because when you do something once that no-one has ever done before, it’s innovative. When you give someone something nobody has ever done before and you let them all use it for their own creations, it’s a tool. The Wiimote is just another controller. It’s just another joystick. The design of games is still no different.

So gameplay is dying. And according to Costikyan, the industry needs to die, or it will crash itself. This sort of collapse happened in 1983, called the “Atari Crash.” A lot of us hip young freshie designers don’t know about it or can’t concieve of it because we weren’t alive back then. But it was bad, and there was a period of almost nothing in gaming until Japan and Nintendo suddenly brought it back again with the NES. We don’t want that to happen. So we need to look for innovation, for avant-garde games, to stop us from stagnating.

A huge source of inspiration for developers and publishers right now should be independent games. Not that independent games are all that great; personally, I usually can’t stand playing many of them. Much like indie film, they rely too much on shock value and mechanics and not enough on substantial experience. For them, it’s all about gameplay: it’s all casual. I’m a hardcore gamers. I’m a narratologist. I like story and plot points and cinematic. I like experience, and my closest friends dying, and the rookie coming out on top and Saving Private Ryan stories. I won’t experience those things in my own life; that’s why I play games, for new experiences.

However, developers need to learn from the indie market! The game I’ve been referring to again and again through this article, Portal, such a great example of what we need, is based off an independently developed student game named Narbacular Drop! I played it, and it was awful. Revolutionary, but terrible. But they had the idea down: portals, gravity, acceleration and perhaps most importantly, the core thesis of designing an action game you never actually hurt anyone or anything. Add some fascinating narrative and make the experience unforgettable, courtesy of Valve, and you have yourself a gorgeous gem of a game that now sells companion cube plushies.

The time is coming where the game market will be flooded by kitsch games that people will buy just because they’re on the market, and slowly gaming will lose its steam. Much like the decline of our contemporary civilization, we can’t let that happen. We need to continue forward, pushing for development, for improvement and preventing collapse at all angles. In this time of dire need, we need avant-garde. Otherwise, it’ll be a sad, slow, funless time before gaming comes back in a rebirth again.

As Chicago remembers through exhibitions, lectures, articles, radio programs, and other events a pivotal moment of 40 years ago when, during a hot August, our city, like the rest of the country, was at war with itself, we catch glimpses of protesters being beaten by police, Richard J. Daley trampling on every right this country holds dear, and artists’ responses to the “bloodbath.” What we have not seen, however, is an inquiry into the role of Chicago’s artists in the protests themselves, and how the movement utilized art to advance its cause and make it accessible to the wider public. Exhibitions like 1968: Art and Politics in Chicago at the DePaul University Museum of Art and Looks Like Freedom at DOVA on the University of Chicago campus show responses – but did visual art and artists actually play a role in communicating the message of the protest movement to the public at large during that week of the convention? And was it effective?

“Art doesn’t have the power to do that, and I don’t think it should be used for that,” says Chicago abstract painter Vera Klement. Klement adds that she did , however, participate in the Lo Giudice Gallery benefit show in support of the protesters, as many other local and national artists did, but the content of the work was not always political.

The story of the Paris uprisings of May 1968, just a few months before the Chicago convention, looks very different. Artists, students, and workers came together for a stunningly choreographed protest, where the message of the movement was branded and disseminated through scores of art posters, which remain testaments to the power of visual images to persuade and move people to action. The theorists behind the political movement were the Situationists, a group of Marxist artists and thinkers whose most visible figure, Guy Debord, author of the seminal book Society of the Spectacle, discussed the importance of mass media (what he called spectacle) in creating perception. Their slogans, plastering the walls and facades of Paris, infiltrated the consciousness of the entire country.

In 1968 Chicago, there was a different form of artistic participation. Artists like Claes Oldenburg, Mark di Suvero, Dominick di Meo, Ellen Lanyon, and others either participated in the protests or otherwise expressed their sympathies with the protesters through civic action. There was no concerted and coherent movement to engage the Chicago public’s sympathy for the cause through visual art.

Certainly there was plenty of documentation of the protests. Chicago documentarian Tom Palazzolo, for example, filmed the events, the beatings, and the organizers. He met with Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs, Terry Southern, and others at the Coliseum exhibition Un-Birthday Party for LBJ, which featured artists who donated work in support of the protest movement, and where speeches were made to stir the passions of the people. In my brief interview with Palazzolo, he reminisced about the speeches and the performance-like atmosphere created by the “Yippies,” the Young International Party members that included Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Allen Ginsberg and Phil Ochs. Also among that cohort was photographer Art Shay, who documented the Convention week, and recently wrote about his memories of the events at swans.com. But why was art only a tool for chronicling, and not advancing, the cause?

The 1968 Chicago protests were organized by the Students For a Democratic Society, the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, and the Yippies, formed only a year earlier in the home of Abbie Hoffman, the spokesperson for the group who would go on to write the iconic manual for dissidence, Steal This Book. Soon the Yippies took center stage in the planning of the protests in Chicago by proclaiming the event a music festival, “the festival of life,” and as such more likely to attract a national participation of hippies as well as activists. Abbie Hoffman wrote in the Yippie manifesto: “We shall not defeat Amerika by organizing a political party. We shall do it by building a new nation – a nation as rugged as the marijuana leaf.” To achieve this goal, the Yippies, and especially Hoffman, used theatrics and absurdist performances, which attracted the attention of the press and other media much more than pure political activism – a method directly inspired by the Situationists’ theories on massmedia and protest-as-art. Examples of Hoffman’s performances include organizing an anti-war demonstration in which 50,000 protesters tried to levitate the Pentagon; in 1967, bringing some of his colleagues to the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange, where he threw fistfuls of dollars down to the traders below, watching as many of them began furiously clamoring the money; and, during the 1968 protests, launching the rumor that they would put LSD in the water system, and nominating a pig, Pigasus, for president. These types of performances have been used most recently by the Yes Men, and even Michael Moore, who ran several ficus plants for congressional seats in several states during the 2000 elections.

In analyzing the role that visual art played in the protests, we realize the most significant difference between the situations in France and Chicago: France in 1968 was a country dominated by socialist and Marxist ideals, with the great majority of the population, not to mention the intellectuals, convinced of the inherent virtues of class equality and the need for reform. Although an important element in the uprising, the Vietnam War was just one of the concerns advanced by the students and workers who ended up paralyzing the French economy until the government caved to their economic demands. On the other hand, America in 1968 was divided between the young progressives and the older conservatives. And after its own internal fight with Communism in the 1950s, the America of the sixties was torn.

“Communist” was still a smear used to incite hatred and contempt for the reformists. In this climate, it is only logical that the dominant artistic movement in the States was Modernism, with its abstract painting devoid of narrative and direct social critique.

Art’s mission in the America of the sixties, as proclaimed by Clement Greenberg, was not to advance social agendas, but to engage in discourse with itself on its own nature; visual art simply was not utilized on a mass scale to communicate or advance political goals. Nonetheless, artists did support the progressive anti-war movement either directly by protesting, or subsequently by participating in response shows that attracted national media attention. Unfortunately, in the States that wasn’t enough; Richard Nixon still won the presidency. It would take a few more years for the movement to slowly convince the country to reform.

May 1968 posters made by the Atelier Populaire.

This article first appeared in the November 2008 of Chicago Artists’  News for the 40th anniversary of the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention.