The Great Art Debate

[Montreal Wanderer]

That's the spirit, Tango. It is not whether the result is great art or not, but the enjoyment you have in picturing and producing the Bennet's locale (and local).

[TANGODANCER]

That's the spirit, Tango. It is not whether the result is great art or not, but the enjoyment you have in picturing and producing the Bennet's locale (and local).

Great art Monty. The wife said it wasn't bad, and she really liked the flowers too. "Er, what flowers?" I asked. "The tile you painted" she replied, "it's really nice"

I mixed all my colours on a large bathroom tile. She really thought it was a painting.

[Montreal Wanderer]

That's the spirit, Tango. It is not whether the result is great art or not, but the enjoyment you have in picturing and producing the Bennet's locale (and local).

Great art Monty. The wife said it wasn't bad, and she really liked the flowers too. "Er, what flowers?" I asked. "The tile you painted" she replied, "it's really nice"

I mixed all my colours on a large bathroom tile. She really thought it was a painting.

[William the White]

Sarah Lucas is clearly elbowing her way into the Tracy Emin faction of traditional art (indeed I'm told they are friends). Her current exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery until 15 Dec gets this preview from The Guardian.

Her way with everyday materials is extraordinary, especially what she's lately been doing with tights... Coiled together like embracing penises, breasts or exposed innards, they sum up her special gift for evoking a tumultuous mix of bodily vulnerability, desire, fear, misunderstanding and embarrassment.

TANGO will be on the next train to London. Bobo will be making his sandwiches for the journey.

As for me - I'm hoping to get to see it...

So, on Friday, I went to see it...

The exhibition is penis-heavy, it's fair to say. This includes, in one room, two sculpture/installations of gigantic penises (about 8 foot long and impressive in circumference) balanced on cars that have been mechanically crushed. The 'message' here may be something to do with the penis as a car crash...

The most impressive work of penitopia though comes in her giant (20'x20' at a guess) collage/photograph, called Soup, that fills the back wall of the first room of the exhibition... This is, in effect, a massively blown-up photograph of a bowl of vegetable soup... you know, carrots, peas, stuff like that, to which has been added 77 (I counted, but might be out by say 5 either way) penises photographed from the front, so that they bob along merrily with the carrots and peas etc. It is clearly a 'cream of...' soup - it is white, and slightly foaming, and might put the viewer in mind of - sperm. Maybe this is deliberate?

There are six toilets in this room, some plastic and some illuminated and some engaged...

There are also two mechanical arms moving up and down, in a piece entitled 'Mechanical Wanker'...

The last room in the exhibition has some beautiful bronze sculptures of limbs entwined, these I really liked...

I'll report on the other three galleries we visited in a frenetic but good couple of days in London, and the tremendous production of Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui that we saw later. but I know visitors to this thread will be anxious for news of Sarah Lucas, so they can plan their visits...

[mummywhycantieatcrayons]

Sounds dreadful, Will - I look forward to hearing of what else you visited!

[William the White]

Sounds dreadful, Will - I look forward to hearing of what else you visited!

To be fair to an artist who is much respected and admired by her peers, there were many individual pieces that worked (imho). The show together, though. was, for me, just a slow bubbling stew of sexual 'transgression' that was neither politically challenging nor artistically innovative - though individual exhibits certainly were. Put them all together like this and it seems gross and repetitive. And self-indulgent. And often banal. And never erotic (not that she would want it to be). If you find yourself on Whitechapel High Street, the exhibition is free. i'd be interested in someone else's take on it. But I don't advocate you or anyone else making a detour for it. I was the least taken by it of the three of us - partner and daughter were more positive in their response. Maybe it speaks differently to women?

One of the other galleries came from your recco of some months ago. We went to the Estorick collection of Italian art and were very pleased to have done so. As well as the futurist works (and their cousins) in the permanent collection there was a temporary exhibition of works - etchings and, obviously, sculpture by Emilio Greco. Exquisite.

The permanent collection could have been ten times larger and I'd have stayed all day. It's hard for me to overcome the artists' political adherence to Mussolini but I liked particularly one of the Severini's (the cubist-influenced 'The Boulevard') and several by Carlo Carra - particularly his 'Synthesis of a Cafe Concert' and 'The Boxer'.

So thank you for the recco...

More later.

[TANGODANCER]

Got the painting bug for a bit right now. Knocked out another couple of daubs. Frame is only stuck underneath the pic for effect. Tracy wouldn't approve (probably Will or Mummy neither) but us artists won't be kept down...

[Montreal Wanderer]

Well, I'm impressed Tango! Attaboy.

[William the White]

Got the painting bug for a bit right now. Knocked out another couple of daubs. Frame is only stuck underneath the pic for effect. Tracy wouldn't approve (probably Will or Mummy neither) but us artists won't be kept down...

I approve - and I couldn't even paint a garden fence!

It's great when people find an outlet for their creativity - I'm grateful that i was lucky enough to find mine. Both the paintings you've put up look really pretty.

[TANGODANCER]

If I could have just one iota of the talent of a modern painter, Uraguayan artist Alvaro Castagnet would be that man. Spare a few minutes to see a real artist at work. Dazzling use of the art of impressionism.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LQIPAR1_E8" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[William the White]

Of the four galleries we visited in our culture vulture trip to London the exhibition I feel I can recommend most enthusiastically is Mira Schendel at Tate Modern. She has 14 rooms here so, inevitably, the quality varies and some I didn't like at all. But most of it I did. The introductory abstract impressionist work is really attractive, I feel. Her experimentation with words in her art and then simply letters divorced from 'meaning' is exciting - particularly the work on rice paper, hanging from he ceiling, transparent, so it has no 'front' or 'back' (Room 7). Her work seems ethereal, fragile, endangered. At the end of my tour of the exhibition I returned to Room 7 to spend more time with her art.

And finally... the Hayward has an exhibition by Ana Mendieta, Her career was tragically brief - born in 1948, she died in 1985, falling from the 35th floor of a New York skyscraper. Her husband was found not guilty of her murder.

I didn't know her work. It is disturbing, a mixture of film, art and commentary in which her body and the earth is the subject and object. We see her naked body covered in grass, earth, pebbles, rocks, water. There are short films that seem threatening, dangerous, sexually charged... She was a 'challenging' artist... I found it a challenging exhibition. Not in a bad way... Though the work of her final years seemed less dangerous, less imaginative, more repetitive...

[mummywhycantieatcrayons]

Great stuff, Tango - more than a touch of early Camille Pissarro in that top one.

This one in the National Gallery (and of a place minutes from my house, as Pissarro stayed nearby to avoid the Franco-Prussion war in 1870-71, as did Monet): http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paint ... er-norwood" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

And this from the year before in Louveciennes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Road_ ... ssarro.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[mummywhycantieatcrayons]

In a very bizarre turn of events that really needs a longer explantion, I had the bizarre experience of presenting a TV programme for a Chinese channel on the new exhibition at the National Gallery on Tuesday this week: Facing the Modern - The Portrait in Vienna 1900.

It's a fantastic exhibition. I had the privilege of interviewing Gemma Blackshaw the curator, who has done a magnificent job of bringing the art of this amazing time and place to life and securing loans not only of the big three - Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka - but some really interesting lesser-known artists too.

Vienna - remarkable in that in 1913, Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky, Tito and Freud all lived there at the same time. The quality and diversity of intellectual and cultural life there in the 20 years leading up to that can't have been surpassed in many times or places.

[TANGODANCER]

Great stuff, Tango - more than a touch of early Camille Pissarro in that top one.

This one in the National Gallery (and of a place minutes from my house, as Pissarro stayed nearby to avoid the Franco-Prussion war in 1870-71, as did Monet): http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paint ... er-norwood" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

And this from the year before in Louveciennes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Road_ ... ssarro.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Good stuff Mummy. Right now I'm just getting into it and copy others stuff for practise. I do love the good impressionists and the Pissaros are classic examples. It's why I like Castagnet who I regard as a modern geius. A lot of modern painters work from photographs, which just gives greater credit to the old masters who had no such help.

[Raven]

Very nice indeed.

[Raven]

Here's my latest work in progress, recently fixed the mouth and worked on the shading more - for some reason been told I am not hanging that anywhere in the house!


DSC_5678[1] by Talie64, on Flickr

[bobo the clown]

Here's my latest work in progress, recently fixed the mouth and worked on the shading more - for some reason been told I am not hanging that anywhere in the house!

That'll be because it's an ex-girlfriend Raven.

Women can be odd about these things.

[William the White]

In a very bizarre turn of events that really needs a longer explantion, I had the bizarre experience of presenting a TV programme for a Chinese channel on the new exhibition at the National Gallery on Tuesday this week: Facing the Modern - The Portrait in Vienna 1900.

It's a fantastic exhibition. I had the privilege of interviewing Gemma Blackshaw the curator, who has done a magnificent job of bringing the art of this amazing time and place to life and securing loans not only of the big three - Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka - but some really interesting lesser-known artists too.

Vienna - remarkable in that in 1913, Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky, Tito and Freud all lived there at the same time. The quality and diversity of intellectual and cultural life there in the 20 years leading up to that can't have been surpassed in many times or places.

Do you know Tom Stoppard's intellectual comedy Travesties? Set in Zurich, 1917, when James Joyce, the Dadaist Tristan Tzara and Lenin were all in residence,and where the British Embassy promoted a production of The Importance of Being Earnest? It is a brilliant achievement, highly comic intermingling of ideas about politics, fiction and art in a parody of Oscar Wilde. I was once called in by a director to talk to his company in rehearsal about WTF Lenin was talking about in a lengthy abstruse speech about Marxist theory and socialist history - I'm not sure how enlightened they were by the end, but they were pleased to know it all had real meaning...

Will you be on youtube with Mandarin subtitles?

[Raven]

Here's my latest work in progress, recently fixed the mouth and worked on the shading more - for some reason been told I am not hanging that anywhere in the house!

That'll be because it's an ex-girlfriend Raven.

Women can be odd about these things.

Nah most of them are real horrors!

[Montreal Wanderer]

In a very bizarre turn of events that really needs a longer explantion, I had the bizarre experience of presenting a TV programme for a Chinese channel on the new exhibition at the National Gallery on Tuesday this week: Facing the Modern - The Portrait in Vienna 1900.

It's a fantastic exhibition. I had the privilege of interviewing Gemma Blackshaw the curator, who has done a magnificent job of bringing the art of this amazing time and place to life and securing loans not only of the big three - Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka - but some really interesting lesser-known artists too.

Vienna - remarkable in that in 1913, Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky, Tito and Freud all lived there at the same time. The quality and diversity of intellectual and cultural life there in the 20 years leading up to that can't have been surpassed in many times or places.

I doubt that Hitler or Stalin made much of a contribution to the intellectual and cultural life of anywhere they lived! Not too sure about Tito either...