Operation Z4: Staring at the whore-like visage of ‘creatives’

“…the signs and signals, the symbols, gestures and messages through which western society sustains, sells, identifies and yet obscures itself by painting or powdering over its raddled, whore-like visage…” Dennis Potter, The Times

We should not confound the BMW Z4 with the advertisement which attempts to sell it. The Z4 is, like all other cars, a dream, a symbol and a piece of rust in the making.

The advertisement on the other hand is the weaver of the dream, the maker of the symbol. The dream has been made for us by ad agency ‘creatives’, God help us all.

And the dream is this: someone is painting. I think he’s a famous artist. But he isn’t painting like any ordinary painter, standing up straight and respectable next to a canvas, carefully recording. No, he’s dripping and splashing the paint on. He’s slipping and sliding in it. He’s free, he’s wild, he’s orgasmic. The painting is him.

Then he’s a car, somehow. It’s this slow transformation across 60 or so years of painter into car that is mysterious, but this is all a dream, and things in dreams are inexplicable. And the transformation is as immediate as it is slow.

Does everyone understand this dream, does everyone live it? Or are dreams categorised into socio-economic groups? Do I need an art history degree to buy a Z4?

The alchemy that has taken place is not just present in our culture, it is our culture. It is the recycling and transformation of the profound into the shallow, the ineffable into the unspeakable, the sublime into the smug. But it’s ok, generally we barely notice this happening, and we care even less.

The action painter reveals himself directly. He does not need to think, he does not need to theorise or hold himself back. He expresses himself.

The Z4 expresses itself, turning this way and that, painting as it goes, wild, free and orgasmic. The colours are primary, bright and gaudy. There’s a radical spatter of red on the Z4’s haunches. There’s an economic crisis on: this is no time to paint with shit browns and puke greens and finally unrelieved blacks, no time to drink yourself to death, take a mistress, drive drunk and die in a car crash.

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Folkestone Collection at the Grand

The Folkestone Collection exhibition at the Grand Hotel, on the Leas, Folkestone, is an excellent and surprising example of the treasures held by many a provincial town’s art vaults.

We get Victor Pasmore, Peter Blake, Fred Cuming and Carel Weight. A mind altering, transcendental woodcut from Monica Poole, and an early 1970’s view of modern art that is all that modernism should be – hopeful for the future , vibrant, colourful and yet systematic and full of skill and craftsmanship.

The most significant thing we get though is a mighty blow for the print against the painting. Although there are some excellent paintings to be seen, it is the prints which really caught my attention.

Peter Blake’s prints – illustrations of scenes from Alice Through The Looking Glass - are like a distillation of everything good in 1970s England. I was transported into Blake’s world, which sat so beautifully with Lewis Carroll’s. I’m no Blake expert, but these seem his best works.

Weight’s massive painting of The Poet is a thing to behold. It is a game played with perspective, colour and juxtaposition of forms. I wouldn’t be surprised if it overtly refers to the poetry of its subject.

Victor Pasmore’s abstract print is a masterpiece. It has the sureness of composition and colour of his best work.

Everyone will have their favourites from this exhibition. To happen upon it is like rolling back a mossy boulder to reveal caverns of shimmering stalagmites. As someone who believes in the transformative power of art, I can say no more than that I came away inspired, resolving to apply the same levels of care, creativity and intelligence on show at the Grand to my own work.

The pieces might have been exhibited more accessibly. The tea rooms are a nice enough setting, but many of the prints are best appreciated at very close quarters, and not across a dining table.

This exhibition is highly recommended. Hurry, it runs until 5th May, 2009.

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Tate Modern: Rodchenko and Popova

In early twentieth century Russia, two great histories intersected. Revolutionaries tried to reinvent society and what it could be. Artists redefined not only what art would look like, but its purpose and role, which until then had been to decorate the living rooms of the bourgeoisie.

Into this larger-than-life, wide-screen epic, the figures of Rodchenko and Popova enter stage left. One expects their work at Tate Modern to be on the grand scale, overwhelming in the way that something like, say, Picasso’s Guernica or Rothko’s “Colour as Subject” canvases are; which is to say, somehow beyond the normal scale of things, emerging as mythic emblems or spiritual experience from far beyond the everyday.

In some ways, neither Popova nor Rodchenko disappoint. We witness some of the very earliest realisations of art as design; of design as art; of the marriages and cross-breeding of architecture, theatre and book design and art in the service of politics. Some of the poster designs manage to capture the scope, ambition and sheer numbers involved in the Revolution and its aftermath. Not to mention that Popova’s work marked the emergence of women in the avant-garde.

And yet it is the tiny prosaic details underlying the poetry which capture the attention. Most memorably, there are the constant reminders of the materials on which both Popova and Rodchenko composed. The grain of plywood re-emerging slowly over the years, as the vibrancy of oils used to compose early geometric pieces fades away. Rough drawings on card, cardboard, scraps of paper, the fraying textiles of abstract collages. All turning to dust.

Even for intellectuals, life was hard in Revolutionary Russia. Perhaps it’s fanciful to imagine these great proponents of technology-as-art scrabbling around for something – anything – to paint on. And yet Liubov Popova’s life was short and painful. She took a year to recover from a bout of typhoid in 1919, but her husband did not. In 1924, she and her son succumbed to scarlet fever. She was thirty five years old. Vita brevis, ars slightly longa.

There is plenty to see at this exhibition. For me, the early non-objectivist painting experiments and the photography and advertising posters are the highlights. In the photographs, subjects seem to want to burst forth from the confines of the frame. In the posters, the dynamism and boldness feel like they are charged with some Revolutionary life force.

What did not work for me were the agitprop pieces, extolling the virtues of trade union membership, economic plans and the like. They left me cold not on political grounds, but on aesthetic ones. They are mirrored in tone, perhaps, by some of Rodchenko’s pronouncements writ large on the walls of the Tate. These are deadening, impenetrable, over-intellectualised statements of what (apparently) Rodchenko thought he was playing at. I came away with the feeling that he was setting up a barrier between himself and the world. Given the circumstances, perhaps it was best for a Russian artist (who was marginalised during the 1930s as Social Realism became dominant), to be on his guard. Aleksandr Rodchenko died in 1956.

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The Old High Street

The depth of darkness is Dickensian on The Old High Street. Piss-yellow light seeps into Folkestone’s black night. I walk up the hill towards the source of the fast-food stench. The fugg rolls past, down to the sickly harbour. Old businesses are dead and dying, young ones are alive and trying to kick. Deserted laundromats and chic galleries, cheap arcades neon lit like a vision of hell, old curiosity shops, cafe bars and coffee houses, bric-a-brac and urbane cafes. The quick and the dead.

It’s like watching a dying animal give birth. Never mind the works of art in Folkestone, Folkestone is the work of art. See it now before it dies.

The Old High Street is brown ale in your cappucino, it is mud in your eye and beautiful paintings, it’s a boutique hotel readying itself for a first visitor, sometime, any time, and a Christian bookshop teleported from Old Dublin, birth control models intact and graphic.

A drunk walks behind, muttering darkly. I wonder will he attack me. He remarks on the weather, I let him slip by, he mentions the cold again. This time I answer, because he isn’t a threat, or a photo opportunity, but just a genial young man in the cold, with a few too many drinks inside.

I walk back to the car through the super-real light. Tribal teens bored and posturing, a bag lady, a corporate coffee shop. I am not sure if this is the still-born future or the dawn of something real. I’ll keep on taking my photographs, and see what happens.

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