"If you can say it... Why paint it?" A review of the key concepts of Contemporary Art

Paul McCarthy Santa Claus, Tokyo, Japan, 1996

Because Berlin loves Bears... You can find thousands of them, both in very official places and in some of the oddest corners of the city. Among many of them, reappropriated by artists, advertisers and therefore tourists, the black bear on Berlin's flag is the one that conclusively binds the animal with it's cultural identity.

Walk along Unter den Linden and try to define a taxonomy of the many "by-products" which shows the bear in countless funny situations... Mugs, T-shirts, pens, postcards... Bring something from Berlin? Bring a bear! So, what would be the ultimate tourist experience if not getting transformed into a bear?

In fact, and although sleeper's footage is currently exhibited at Tate Liverpool, this is not this artwork that the Turner Prize jury awarded. The winner project is called State Britain and recreates the peace campaigner Brian Haw's anti-war protest in Parliament Square. You probably saw it if you visited London and therefore Big-Ben, two steps away from Brian Haw's camp. Precise in every details, from the tea-making area to the numerous banners, flags, photographs and posters, Wallinger apparently hired 14 people for six months to source the materials and carefully weather and age them to a state of complete authenticity.

Can you see the black tape line drawn on the Tate gallery's floor, behind the artist? It appears that this line defines exactly the actual zone of exclusion drawn in May 23 2006 following the passing by parliament of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act that forbade unauthorised demonstrations within a kilometre of Parliament Square!

The artwork stands exactly on this line... How clever... Therefore, it becomes 'outlaw' but culturally approved by the government and therefore untouchable, which brings back to life the Brian Haw tools for protestation. Moreover, it attracts the attention of the media and demonstrates how art and language can be powerful!

Let’s first have a look on the background. The saturated red color, fills heavily every inches of the frame with sexual connotations.

Her ruffled hair and her naked body under the bedding indicates that the scene takes probably place after the sexual act. She significantly protects her crotch with both clasped hands. Beautiful, ...she is, she is an exact compromise between sexual icon (blond hair, pulpy with a huge breast) and ordinary (shadows on her face, blunt nose, unsteady breast). She is the victim of a voyeurism act that YOU, the viewer, perpetrate. Prisoner of the canvas, of the tainted surrounding air and prisoner of her own attributes... Her beauty is her burden, heavily symbolised by her breast. She is trapped!

This stereotype that shapes the cage of our True Drapped Blonde is central in Yuskavage paintings and I invite you to have a look on the flickr diaporama available on the right column of this blog to discover more of her amazing artworks.

Technically, Lisa's work is recognized as particularly impressive among connoisseurs: She apparently uses models to study lights and shadows; photos to frame the paintings, her work is so impressive technically (paint strokes, mastering of light effects...etc.) that specialised art press often compare her to Renaissance masters (No joking).

To replace her work in a more general art world background, she is often associated with artists such as John Currin (Google his name on Google image or click there to go on the BBC website or slate.com, you ll see the similarities by yourself), Luc Tuymans and Elizabeth Peyton in the 1990's, reaching superstar status after reinserting figuration in the art world.

Call it kitsch, call it soft-porn, call it gorgeous, sexy, weird or embarrassing, appealing or repulsive, Lisa yuskavage paintings shake the art world... but what about you?

So...? Do you like it? Do not forget to vote on the right hand side column of this blog!!!!

;-)

• 50% Funky Soul Baby
• 42% Groovy for sure
• 7% Not the type of artwork I d hang on my living room wall
• 0% Rather listening to Enya

I am glad you like it!!! Something tells me that we will have to come back to Murakami quite regularly regarding to his actuality!!!

Although the media criticize on the one hand that visitors keep on asking to the staff "how did the artist do that?!" and keep on falling in the crack... (A dozen of accidents reported!); on the other hand, to quote Jonathan Jones from the Guardian Art blog "it is a fissure that doesn't really threaten anything or anyone".

Moreover, he says "Modern art has now become the universal culture of Britain's middle class, of all ages. Yet when a really provocative and powerful contemporary work appears - I'm talking about Damien Hirst's diamond skull - the middle class runs for cover, disturbed by the impossibility of reducing this disturbing object to a liberal platitude".

Photograph: Getty

And here comes our second Artwork: Damien Hirst's Diamond Skull. For me there is nothing controversial about it. I can imagine that it may shake the common mood but honestly, having a look back in the 90's on Tracey Emin's bed, it may suffer the comparison. Remember, she brought her own bed covered of alcohol, germs and traces of her sexual activity... In Saatchi's gallery. Ok! Ok! Nothing to do with the skull, but that rocked! didn't it?

My Bed by Tracey Emin, 1998. Photograph: courtesy Jay Jopling/White Cube.

Here lies the problem. Contemporary art became popular, fashionable, cool (look at this whole blog: I do not think I m the first writing a blog about contemporary art, believing that my view got the spark that will lead me to a Worldwide Web rapid success!) And my generation acknowledged the existence of contemporary art with artists like Emin, Chapman brothers and a pope crushed by a rock came from space. In fact my first memorable artwork was the empty room presented for the Turner Prize by Martin Creed (Work No. 227: The lights going on and off 2000 (installation at Tate Britain)5 seconds on/5 seconds off, Edition 2/electrical time). In fact I found it controversial enough to bring it on the top of my hobby list... Can you imagine now why a skull and diamonds are not controversial to me? Is it controversial to you?

Courtesy Cabinet, London © GBE (Modern) New York Photo: Tate Photography

-John! come here! Take a picture of us in front of this... hmm... Nazi's cross model representing hell, crafted by the Chapman brothers!!!

Yep! Chapman's are cool too nowadays!

The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.
Marcel Duchamp

Hello reader! Look what I found on the Internet today: A press-release from the website of the Guy Hepner gallery... A good occasion to compare those two influential photographers. Unfortunately it is a bit late (till 31/11... and a bit far away as well...). One raised on the east coast, the other in California, but so many similarities...

Terry Richardson- iconic, established, extrovert. Exuberant and erotic at the same time, he has carved a niche as the heavyweight champion of off the wall, spur of the moment, raw talent photography of the past 10 years. His "snapshot aesthetic" is unmistakable, often shot with nothing more than a mundane compact camera. Richardson is an icon, his photos every bit as much. Tony Stamolis- Tony Stamolis's new portfolio is the work of a classic cad: raw and sexy, with a winking sense of humor. The Brooklyn photographer shoots friends, lovers and ad-hoc still lives with a prankster's eye. Never happier than when provoking the masses and challenging the generally accepted, his signature look is captivating, as funny as it is sexy, all the while remaining what it should be: great photography
Work is available from $2500, for all inquiries please email info@guyhepner.com

Do you think they are typical products of the U.S. culture? Have a look at the following text: It comes from a study of Hofstede, well-known in the world of cultural studies who is famous for his work on cultural dimensions and available on his excellent website: http://www.geert-hofstede.com/hofstede_united_states.shtml.

"The high Individualism (IDV) ranking for the United States indicates a society with a more individualistic attitude and relatively loose bonds with others. The populace is more self-reliant and looks out for themselves and their close family members.

The next highest Hofstede Dimension is Masculinity (MAS) with a ranking of 62, compared with a world average of 50. This indicates the country experiences a higher degree of gender differentiation of roles. The male dominates a significant portion of the society and power structure. This situation generates a female population that becomes more assertive and competitive, with women shifting toward the male role model and away from their female role.

World averages shown above are: 55 - 43 - 50 - 64 - 45

The next lowest ranking Dimension for the United States is Power Distance (PDI) at 40, compared to the world Average of 55. This is indicative of a greater equality between societal levels, including government, organizations, and even within families. This orientation reinforces a cooperative interaction across power levels and creates a more stable cultural environment.

The last Geert Hofstede Dimension for the US is Uncertainty Avoidance (UAI), with a ranking of 46, compared to the world average of 64. A low ranking in the Uncertainty Avoidance Dimension is indicative of a society that has fewer rules and does not attempt to control all outcomes and results. It also has a greater level of tolerance for a variety of ideas, thoughts, and beliefs".

Now have a look on their portfolio displayed on the following websites and keep what you just read in mind:

http://www.terryrichardson.com/

http://www.tonystamolis.com/portfolio/01.html

Got it? ;-)

http://www.guyhepner.com/content/content.php?id=753

Here is a part of an article found in the "ART NEWSPAPER", written by Anna Somers Cocks 8.11.07 Issue 185 [Full article available on : http://www.theartnewspaper.com/article.asp?id=6432]

Pope suggests Church should have closer relationship with contemporary art

The Vatican's first contemporary art commission under Benedict XVI goes to Claudio Parmiggiani

The telephone rings: "The Vatican City speaking," says the voice. "Boring joke," thinks Claudio Parmiggiani and puts down the receiver. The telephone has to ring another couple of times before he is persuaded that it really is the Vatican. Then he remembers a local priest who, some months previously, had asked in a general sort of way whether he would be prepared to make a work of art for the Church. [...]No subject is specified, but to Parmiggiani's surprise he sees a book on the table, Sculture d'Ombra, about his works made with smoke. "This is the kind of thing we hope you will create," they say. [...]

Afterwards the pope said to Parmiggiani, ‘I’m very happy to see this work; the Church has always had a close relationship with modern, but not contemporary art.’ He continued: ‘You must tell me one day how you paint with smoke,’ but Parmiggiani just smiled. That is a secret he keeps even from the pope. The retrospective of Claudio Parmiggiani, ‘Apocalypsis cum Figuris’, is at the Palazzo Fabroni, Pistoia, until 23 March 2008

Now the question is why?... Does the brand new pope wants to give a lifting to the Vatican galleries, or is it a PR strategy? Sorry I hardly believe that the pope is interested the least in contemporary art... but the PR option does not sound bad.

Example: A brand new study shows that cookies are bad for health. 3 options:

1. Continue to produce them! Although sick, people will still continue to buy them anyway (bad and not really fashionable in the communication sphere). It means here that the Vatican would stay on its position, denying the contemporary art world critique which would probably get worst and worst. When you talk to someone and that this person does not answer you tend to talk louder and louder, don't you?
   
2. Continue to produce these cookies, but print warning on each packets about high fat... (bad but fashionable in a way...). For the artworld it almost means censorship! Not a good solution indeed as it would advertise the position of the provocateur. The Church would also appear old-fashion, facing 'Left field' edgy art... The Vatican does not need this, do they?
   
3. Get rid of this recipe and develop a brand new one that will bring happiness in "your" body through the use of Omega B27 revolutionary 0% fat oil created in your own laboratory(Really hype and really good)... Hmmm, very trendy!!!!!

Although none of them are proactive strategies, these all give an answer to your customers. In the case of the Christian industry, it seems a bit late to be proactive as you saw previously. But who will shoot someone that commission Claudio Parmiggiani to produce its artworks? The Vatican chose the 3rd of our 3 options!

What a powerful message... How cool the Vatican is! But remember:

Matthew 5:39
39But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.

Pictures:

First artwork by Sarah Lucas: Made entirely from Marlboro Light cigarettes and is titled "Christ You Know It Ain't Easy".

Second one, Maurizio Cattelan "La Nona Ora", sculpture of the pope John Paul II, crushed by a meteorite...

I forget to mention something interesting... Do you know Kanye West? Probably yes...
Did you buy his last album?

Then you may probably know about it:

Yes Ma'am this is another Murakami painting!!! Undoubtly successful!!! ;-)))

The modernism...

Reviewing the advances of modern art history for example, it is easy to dress a parallel between the evolution of art and societal phenomena: The progress of science was accompanied by the development of electronic or multimedia art, bioart and optart.

The theorical concepts used by the major artists of the twentieth century can be found “in Marxist intellectual tradition, in Freudian Psychoanalysis, and in various forms of transaction between the two”. Therefore, marxism theorisation has been developed to analyse colonialism processes; Freudian advances in psychoanalysis have been reappropriated by feminists artists.

The contemporary art world shaped by post-modernist ideologies:

Harrison and Wood (1992) recognise that post-modernism has been introduced by three major theorists: Daniel Bell (1978) as a first author argues that the hope of modernism “lays in a return to consensus based on the shared need for moral and economic order”. Following this definition, Post-modernism would then come as a disruptive approach to modernism.
Habermas’ (1984) as the second major postmodernism theorists is reported to argue (Harrison and Wood, 1992) that “a strong ressource of aesthetic resistance remains necessary as a counter to the increasing power and autonomy of economic and administrative systems”, and therefore explains that the power to resist hegemony on the artworld lays in the hands of those who produce the artworks.
Finally, Harrison and Wood, report Lyotard’s (1984) view on postmodernism as an opposition to Bell’s view in which he “equates the postmodern, with a continuing scepticism regarding a possible consensus [...] with a form of nostalgia for the experience of an unattainable wholeness of presence” (1992:1016). In his view, postmodernism should therefore “wage a war on totality”(1992:1016).

Each of these three views remain influencial in the ‘high art’ sphere and the debate on post-modernism becomes deeper and more subtle. Due to the limitations imposed by the focus of this blog, I will not explore the post-modernism discourse in depth. However, what might be interesting at this point would be to note that each of these authors present a different view on postmodernism, which might have its origin in the three different origins of the writers (U.S.A. for Bell and respectively France and Germany for Lyotard and Habermas). Their views have been shaped by a set of specific social, historical and political conditions associated with each of these three different countries. Although they are different, they remain ‘western views’ and this fact has to be taken into account when debating on the evolution of art history.

The post-modernist critique on art history that claims for the originality of an idea, must therefore also analyse in which position the critique has been written.

Pictures:

Mike Kelley - Craft Morphology Flow Chart

Jeff Koons- Balloon Dog

Read more...

• Bell, D., ‘Modernism and Capitalism’, in Bell, 1978
• Habermas, J (1984) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity
• Harrison C. And Wood P. (1992) Art in Theory 1900-1990. Oxford
• Lyotard, J-F (1984) The Postmodern Condition, Manchester: Manchester University Press

Why artwork of the month? First because I know most of the potential first readers of this modest blog... and I know that a lot of them may like it as well. This artwork may ring a bell to a full generation of people born in the 80's, grew up showered by the animes, in fact the next generation of contemporary art collectors. Do you want to be part of it?...

Second argument the name of the artwork: Francis Bacon Study of Isabel Rawsthorne If you become a regular reader of this blog, you will soon see that I am a fan of Francis Bacon work... For memory, here is the original "Study of Isabel Rawsthorne" painted in 1966:

Takeshi Murakami, the artist, is born in 1962 in Tokyo (Japan) and is the head of an artistic tendency called "superflat" led with Hideaki Anno, Satoshi Kon. Murakami defines “Superflat” in broad terms, so the subject matter is very diverse. Often the works take a critical look at the consumerism and sexual fetishism that is prevalent in post-war Japanese culture. Murakami's work is POP, as it recalls clearly other artworks produced by Roy Lichtenstein or Andy Warhol a couple of decades ago. It is clearly a re-appropriation of the global culture idols such as Mickey Mouse who is suggested through a lot of his artworks for example (see Tantan Bo below). It is also surrealist... Look closer at this other artwork:

For anybody familiar with Yves Tanguy artworks, it may ring a bell... unspecified entities whose height cannot really be evaluated, the parallel with Yves Tanguy landscapes is easy to do...

Yves Tanguy - Indefinite Divisibility 1942

The artwork of the month reaches potentially a wide audience, recycling elements of the art and the "global contemporary culture" to reintroduce them from another angle... It points at social patterns culturally taken for granted and re-introduce them, allowing the questionment of a social environment in which the 1980's generation grew-up. And it seems to work: Murakami was ranked the 98th most powerful personality of the ArtReview 2006 Power 100, but climbed to the 89th position this year; probably due to his partnership for the design of the last Louis Vuitton collection or for the success of his "superflat" artists who all had solo exhibitions this year in France!

Tantan BO 2001

It addresses our generation (The future collectors...), the art world (post-modern concerns and homage to great artists...), it has every ingredients to make it a great success! And it already is!!!

Murakami: Already a hit... A future legend...

© CA2M / Shigeru Ban Architects Europe & Jean de Gastines / Artefactory

Historically/Architecturally designed as a fortress, Metz is getting experience in developing massive military infrastructures of all kind and this last one is loaded by the Centre Beaubourg (Paris) war machine itself. But let's have a look onto the technical features:

• The Magazine: A virtual capacity of 58,000 artworks that compose the biggest European contemporary art collection (Just for you to remember that France still get the first place on the podium concerning worldwide transactions weighted by countries with an astonishing 18,8% of the volume for the year 2006!!! (source artprice report http://img1.artprice.com/pdf/trends2006.pdf))
  
• A Barrel made of cultural decentralisation initiated in 1997 by Jean-Jacques Aillagon who wanted to fight cultural prejudices or something like that...
  
• Hammer: Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres head from the ministry of culture. Hmmm... Is this whole project only a strategy to knock over the dinosaur Jean-Marie Rausch at the head of the city since 1971!!!
• The design: Shigeru Ban... The best is simply to have a look on the result... A world class architect! "profiled by Time Magazine in their projection of 21st century innovators in the field of architecture and design".
  

The Target? You... Paris, the French reputation for cultural matters (which is rather bad especially since François Pinault the most influential figure of the contemporary art world, abandoned in Paris a full bag of amazing projects for purchasing the Palazzo Grassi on the Grand Canal in Venice... Ok fair enough...) This is not Tate Modern, nor beaubourg but it does not have any pretension... I believe this Chinese hat will have a lot to say to the people of Metz. Let's hope that the audience will be responsive! Good Luck!

OPENING IN 2009

The bullets? well let' s dream:

Francis Bacon, Three Figures in a Room, 1964, oil on canvas, 198 x 441 cm, Georges Pompidou Center, Paris.

Dream on.............

"L'art c'est ce qui rends la vie plus interessante que l'art"(Art is what makes life more interesting than art)Robert Filiou, (1926-1987)

With the repetition of the 50 pictures, each of them altered singularly by the process of silk-screen printing, the artist suggests the viewer the power of the mass media. The canvas depicts a society which faces the rise of advertisement and mass consumption so efficiently that the world will give it an iconic status. However, Warhol does not only comment on the stars iconic status as a glamour figure, but also on “the role of the star as a mass media commodity, as a product of the entertainment industry that could be indefinitely reproduced for mass consumption” (Schroeder 2005). Andy Warhol’s ‘Marilyn’still stands out from the crowd and remains one of the greatest criticisms of the 1960’s society. It entered popular culture better than any other texts produced at this time probably due to his intelligent choice of the communication channel used to transmit his message: a work of art.Similarly, Francis Bacon has been reported to justify why he used paintings rather than other communication channels to express his ideas on human condition by the following statement: “If you can say it, why paint it?”

Interested??? You will be glad to know that this amazing Marilyn Monroe Diptych painted in 1962 is currently hanged on TATE Liverpool walls, part of an amazing collection of contemporary artworks (Go to see Cindy Sherman or Sarah Lucas for me please...)http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/the-twentieth-century/figuration.shtm