Chinoiserie and the wicked West

 art  1 Response »
Jan 152010
 

This morning to the Chinoiserie exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). An opportunity to compare, side by side, Asian originals with Western versions of them. A lovely couple of hours.

It was irritating to read the commentary. Westerners (a) mostly got the East wrong (b) if they got it right, always stripped away all original meaning from the objects.  There was a lovely figure of Guang Yin, for example (rather like the one above) a precise copy, according to the catalogue . But the spiritual meaning was absent, said the catalogue: the porcelain figure was merely “a decorative object”. This claim was repeated three more times about different items.

Unpacked, the writer means that no-one in the West who looked at such figures knew about or responded to their spiritual significance. That’s one fine-grained retrospectoscope.

Nothing much at all about how chinoiserie adds something different – gets a new thing right – and of course nothing about the compliment of wanting to copy such figures. Edward Said said (in 1978!) that ‘the West’ always and everywhere got ‘the East’ wrong so no exceptions will be allowed. Since then, Said’s claims have been extensively criticised by other scholars, but the NGV leaves that out. As it leaves out the converse – how ‘the East’ got ‘the West’ wrong.

But there you are, the things are there to be seen, and if you live in Melbourne, you should see them.

 Posted by bruce at 2:02 pm  Tagged with:

Phony art films

 art  1 Response »
Mar 222009
 

A younger generation – there, I’ve said it – is suspicious of the ‘art film’. The category itself is an odd one, implying as it does that other kinds of movies can’t be ‘art’. It was the collapse of the ‘high-low’ distinction that made the problem. What used to be arranged in a hierarchy had to be redistributed into genres, and those declared equal. Over here, Truffaut and Pasolini and that lot; over there, slasher movies. Trouble is, there is a lingering aura around ‘art’ which can’t quite be dispelled by reading Walter Benjamin. So the young are quick to pounce on any movie with arty pretensions. And so they should be.

Is a movie like Stephen Daldry’s The Hours an art film? Looks that way – literary subject, for example. But here’s Hermione Lee, biographer of Virginia Woolf, on the scene in which Woolf drowns herself.

Lee ? flinched at the portrayal of Woolf in Stephen Daldry’s film of The Hours. Woolf wrote Mrs Dalloway in her early 40s and committed suicide at age 59, but Lee argues the film makes it seem she killed herself immediately after completing the novel. Lee was also troubled by Daldry’s romantic recreation of Woolf’s suicide, in which she “drifts into this beautiful green leaf-shaded river with birds singing and wonderful throbbing music and sun playing on the dappled water”.

Lee explains, “Woolf killed herself in great agony of mind, on a bleak day in March, in a river where the water runs so fast that nothing grows on the banks.” When Lee confronted Daldry about his travesty of Woolf’s death, he retorted that Nicole Kidman could only film in July.

 Posted by bruce at 11:19 am  Tagged with:

Baal dances!

 art, values  No Responses »
Sep 292008
 

The star lot was The Golden Calf, a bull in a large gold-plated formaldehyde fish tank-a symbol of the worship of a false god. It went for ?10m, bang in the middle of the range. The Kingdom-yet another Hirst shark-went for ?9.6m, well above the ?4m-?6m estimate. This was an incredible, gravity-defying feat. As the sale started, one of America’s largest investment banks went bankrupt, and a giant insurance company, AIG, was saved only by nationalisation just as the auction ended. The shares of even solid, boring banks were crashing in London and New York. The art market was sending a confusing message. Could it really be that a dead bull floating in a tank was a safer home for your cash than a deposit at the Halifax?

_ Ben Lewis in Prospect.

One of those collocations around which ironies spin, a little planetary system of cool. But all, I think, to be resisted. True, it reads like a sketch for an episode in Rushdie. But also like the chapter opening of a future book about the decadence of capitalism.

Elephant stamp to the reader who can spot the source of the entry title.

 Posted by bruce at 10:34 pm  Tagged with: ,

Henson’s photographs

 art, censorship  No Responses »
May 252008
 

It’s progressing nicely. Michael Heyward now lives in a country where we are forbidden to see the work of one of our major artists: the police have been busier than we thought. Catherine Lumby declares her intense seriousness and personal involvement and grasp of the subtleties involved, then says, as usual, that it’s fine by her. She should get herself a rubber stamp.

Meanwhile the press and the police have decided the issue is about whether the photographs are art or pornography, thus excluding all other principles, such as decency. Licence or law, take your pick.

 Posted by bruce at 10:42 pm

Gormless daubers

 art  No Responses »
May 232008
 

And here we go again. The Prime Minister’s nephew, who describes himself as an ‘artist/activist’, is in several kinds of trouble over a picture which shows Ronald McDonald carrying an Olympic torch and running happily past a Buddhist monk in flames.

Deep.

Juxtaposition is the method for the gormless dauber. It allows the cognoscenti to savour the politically OK interpretation (US = evil) while maintaining (of course) the spectator’s freedom to interpret. It saves artists the trouble of arriving at an intelligible or defensible position about anything whatsoever and leaves them free to sloganeer.

Now that the concept of vulgarity has been overtaken by progress we need another to capture work which cheapens human sacrifice. I couldn’t care whether Rudd’s work ‘references’ Banksy (‘reference’ is evasive cant). I do care when an image of ultimate human commitment and suffering is exploited to make childish political noises.

And I care that because of Rudd’s connection with the PM the dreary little episode will circulate for days in that murky asteroid cloud where celebrity merges with creativity. Art school students look on and learn: this is how to build a career.

The last self-immolation to make the news was, wasn’t it, that of a monk in Tibet?

 Posted by bruce at 2:48 pm  Tagged with:

Art as invisible armour

 art, censorship  No Responses »
May 232008
 

Art community defends naked teen photo exhibition.

The moment this story broke this headline (on the ABC site earlier today) was sure to follow. The police are taking a look at the legality of exhibiting naked photographs of children said to be aged thirteen or fourteen. A critic is cited: these photographs do not sexualise the children.

Maybe, maybe not – I haven’t seen them. But we notice once again, as with all such events that the critic (and someone described as an ‘art market analyst’) defend the photographs by making an interpretation – they don’t sexualise the children. In other contexts, you may be sure, these same authorities will make the argument that the interpretation of art is down to the spectator.

It’s not news that the visual arts ‘community’ makes self-contradictory arguments. What’s interesting is the ritual character of these events – people shout, slogans are exchanged, the art world sees the affair as further evidence for the doltishness of everybody not in the art world, right-thinking burghers see it as further evidence of moral decline. Business then continues as usual until the next arbitrary crisis.

The fixity points to an underlying script. Perhaps the concept of art, whether emptied of all meaning, as conservatives claim it now is, or vastly enlarged, as in the aesthetic of the late Robert Rauschenberg, still operates as a quasi-sacred concept. ‘Art’ liberates the artist and the spectator from the rules that govern other forms of exchange. Remember the case of Serrano’s ‘Piss Christ’ (the crucifix suspended in urine)? Desecration was of course the point of the piece – everyone got that – but when Christians actually objected to the desecration of their sacred icon they were treated with derision. The function of the word ‘art’ here is to license licence: we will do as we wish and an invisible barrier will protect us. Well it didn’t in the Serrano case, and I doubt it will in the present one.

 Posted by bruce at 12:34 pm  Tagged with:
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