Red Pepper » Art

The people’s painter

admin — Mon, 26 Aug 2013 12:00:59 +0000

L S Lowry, Going to the Match, 1953. Professional Footballers Association, © The Estate of LS Lowry
Growing up in the mill towns of north-west England, as I did, it is hard not to see the work of L S Lowry with a particular affection and familiarity – as though something of ourselves and our surroundings has been magically encapsulated in the medium of paint. But this very ‘situatedness’ of Lowry has seen his work celebrated as part of the northern heritage industry – a parochial art of merely regional interest, devoid of major importance in the nation’s treasury of significant artworks. For the jet-setting metropolitan art world, Lowry is nostalgic, sentimental, slightly primitive and, worst of all, popular. Despite this enduring popularity, Lowry’s work has not been the subject of a solo-artist exhibition at any major gallery in Britain since his death in 1979.
The art historian Anne Wagner, co-curator with T J Clark of Tate Britain’s forthcoming Lowry exhibition, is unapologetic in dissenting from the prevailing consensus. ‘The national art scene is wrong. This view of Lowry as regional or irrelevant gets his ambitions and contribution as a painter wrong,’ she says.
‘The Tate has bought into this view of modernism in painting as being about the successive stages in the international rise of abstraction,’ she continues. ‘That’s one way of seeing modern painting, but it’s not the only one. What is modern painting? That’s still to be contested; it’s not a done deal. Has figurative painting any role to play in the depiction of modern life? It’s present even in artists where abstraction is so pivotal, like Picasso. Lowry offers something this country – as a nation rather than a set of regions – would be poorer without: the great achievement of actually having painted the effects of industrialisation.’
Political charge
There is clearly a political charge to this re-evaluation. ‘Lowry doesn’t paint from the perspective of the victors; he paints “life from below”, to borrow a key term in the emergence of social history. Seen in the light of the work of other contemporaries – socialist realism, commissions from US industrialists such as Henry Ford, or the iconography of national socialism – Lowry is remarkable for the way working class life is not represented according to the schema of one mode of propaganda or another but simply in its own right. So the act of representing the Hawker’s Cart or the Fever Van registers the aspects of life that would have been foreign to those unfamiliar with the daily realities of ordinary life in working class communities.’
Where we see crowds, we are not confronted with the ‘violent mob’ or the ‘noble proletarian struggle’ but simply people going to see the match, or some other scene of daily life. ‘From a formal point of view, how to paint the crowd is a difficult question. He portrays aspects of working class life without flinching but without reducing the scenes to tragedy or soap opera. But nor is it an affirmative picture of contented communities. It’s not kitsch, by which I mean it doesn’t do your thinking or feeling for you. He was well aware of this danger and became more and more aware of it in representing, in the later work, la comedie humaine, the shared deformity of our condition.’
Lowry spent decades working as a rent-collector – a side of his life that he hid from critics – whose rounds of the streets saw him encounter people on the threshold of the domestic and public spheres. But the view of Lowry as a technically unsophisticated or untutored painter working in a parochial idiom is very far from the truth.
Modern painter
‘We make no bones about this idea of what it means to paint modern life coming over from France and Lowry’s awareness of that,’ says Wagner. Lowry was taught to paint by emigre French impressionist artist Adolphe Valette at the Manchester Municipal School of Art. Wagner remarks on Lowry’s ‘difference from the impressionists but also his relation to the likes of Pissarro in attending to aspects of modern life such as the city-in-transition and the no-man’s land of industrialisation.’
Far from being a naive painter, Lowry was visually literate in the idiom of modern European painting. His work shows notable parallels with other varieties of 20th-century modernism. The angularity of intersecting lines and planes in depicting the excavation of the site for the Rylands mill in central Manchester are reminiscent of Soviet constructivist theatre designs of the 1920s. And there are striking echoes of the work of German expressionists such as George Grosz and Otto Dix after the first world war in The Cripples (1949).
Wagner explains that the exhibition is organised thematically but with a sense of Lowry’s development as an artist in mind. So rooms are devoted, for example, to the ‘Industrial Gothic’ (the dark side of the urban landscape, of human and industrial dereliction); the ‘Social Life of Labour Britain’ (the post-war lightening of the mood where we witness the interior of a hospital, recalling the newly universal access to healthcare, or supporters off to watch the football); and the big industrial panaromas of the 1950s and 1960s, which see Lowry synthesising elements of his work to that point.
Short of totality
But the curators make no claim to represent the totality of Lowry’s output. The dream-images of the fantasy girl/woman simply known as ‘Ann’ do not appear; nor are his private fetishistic/bondage drawings included, which depict a feminine figure trussed up into a sexualised ‘mechano-morphed’ form, or ‘made to submit to the torture of geometry’, as Wagner puts it. The latter are far removed from the conventional avuncular quality of Lowry’s public image, and approach the highly disturbing surreality of Hans Bellmer’s work.
I suggest that this was perhaps an opportunity missed to further unsettle the conventional ‘heritage industry’ view of Lowry. But the curators felt this would have distracted from the core theme of the exhibition, and – particularly in the wake of the Savile scandal and Operation Yew Tree – would have almost exclusively dominated its reception in a media currently dominated by stories of the abuse of young women.
Also missing are the seascapes, which Lowry considered among his best work. Wagner concedes that some of the late seascapes are ‘fascinating’ but proved too hard to integrate, and raised technical difficulties from a curatorial point of view.
Where the posthumous Royal Academy show featured 350 works by Lowry, Tate Britain will exhibit 95, an avowedly selective choice very much focused on his depiction of the north, industrialisation and working class life. But it’s precisely what is most ‘familiar’ in Lowry that we are being encouraged to observe afresh, to see what the prevailing assumptions and traditional genealogies of art history have occluded.
‘Lowry makes such an important contribution, making an honest visual record of all that “industrialisation” – which, together with empire constitutes Britain’s most world-historic legacy – has done to shape our modern lives. He shows something crucial. No-one was painting this stuff. He brought truth to the painting of it. That’s no mean feat.’ And as Wagner herself reflects, the importance of contesting the marginalisation and disparagement of working class experience in British culture takes on a wider relevance in the current economic climate.
‘Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life’ is at Tate Britain until 20 October 2013

Degenerates remembered

admin — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 10:00:50 +0000

Inside Kurt Schwitters’ Merz Barn, built during the final year of his life in exile and left unfinished
Condemned by the Nazis and with his work included in an exhibition of entartete kunst or ‘degenerate’ art, Schwitters was forced to flee from his home in 1937, for exile in Norway. When the Germans invaded Norway in 1940 he was forced to flee for a second time to Britain, where he arrived in the Scottish port of Leith. He was detained as an enemy alien and interned on the Isle of Man. In the camp he participated in group exhibitions and gave poetry performances. On release in 1941 he became involved with the London art scene, engaging with British artists and critics such as Ben Nicholson and Herbert Read. The latter described him as ‘the supreme master of the collage’.
At the end of the war in 1945, Schwitters relocated to the Lake District. Inspired by the rural Cumbrian landscape, he began to incorporate natural objects into his work. During his brief years there (he died early in 1948), he began work on his last great sculpture installation, the Elterwater Merz Barn, a continuation of the Hanover Merzbau – an architectural construction considered to be one of the key lost works of European modernism. It is generally accepted that, despite his high standing as a pioneering artist of the modernist era, his late period English artworks have not been given due recognition, and nor has the importance of his ongoing legacy and contributions to contemporary art and architecture.
Some 65 years on, a group of artists and Tate Britain now intend to rectify the matter. Tate Britain is planning a major exhibition, Kurt Schwitters in Britain, which opens in late January and runs through to mid-May 2013. Schwitters’ surviving Merz Barn building, in the Langdale valley in Cumbria, has also recently been purchased by the Littoral Arts Trust, which plans to restore the Merz Barn and later create a Kurt Schwitters Museum and contemporary art gallery on the site nearby.
Because Schwitters lived much of the latter part of his life as a refugee, the trust plans to develop a centre at the Merz Barn site for refugee artists, including a study centre, gallery and archive that would feature the work of 20th and 2st-century refugee artists, as well as documenting their ongoing contribution to British art since 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany.
Plans also include the creation of a memorial plaza beside the Merz Barn, in memory of the many artists, writers, poets and musicians who Hitler and the Nazis also declared ‘degenerate’. Many of these, including Schwitters, were the leaders and pioneers of the European modern abstract, Dadaist and constructivist art movements, and as such they were also included in the infamous Entartete Kunst exhibition in Munich in 1937. It was at this point that Schwitters, like so many other ‘degenerate’ modern artists, fled his home in Germany for exile. Ironically, it was this extraordinary modernist cultural diaspora, forced by the Nazis, that inadvertently accelerated the spread of modern art and architecture, albeit often as sad fragments of human lives and broken artistic careers, to Britain, the USA and throughout the rest of the world.
In memory of these and the many other artists forced into exile, or who were killed by the Nazis, the trust is now about to begin work on the memorial plaza. The intention, when it is finished, is to hold an annual ‘Reading of the Names’ ceremony on the third weekend of October each year. Artists, writers, musicians, singers, dancers, composers and so on from all over the world will be invited to gather together to read out all the names of the many hundreds of their fellow artists who were persecuted, killed or forced into exile by Hitler and the Nazis.
The names will also be written out in white chalk on the individual blue Lakeland slate stones, on the end wall of the Merz Barn. After a few weeks, the Cumbrian rain will have washed them clean and so the process will be repeated over and over again each year.
Although the trust has had its funding axed by the Arts Council, it remains committed to the project and is resolved to see it through, come what may. The aim is to raise about £30,000 through individual donations and sponsorship by April 2013, to help pay for the construction of the memorial. This includes provision for the establishment of an Entartete Kunst and refugee artists archive and study centre. Artists, designers and architects, art students, musicians, students and good friends of liberty and freedom of speech have been invited to come along and, if they so wish, volunteer their labour, time and skills to help with the memorial project.
Although it is not officially open yet, you can visit the Merz Barn if you call the Littoral Arts Trust first for an appointment. Details at www.merzbarn.net

Call this art?

admin — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 10:00:30 +0000

The Individual and the Organisation: Artist Placement Group 1966–79, a new exhibition at Raven Row in east London, is a collection of documents, videos and objects related to the UK arts organisation the Artist Placement Group (APG). Founded in 1966 by a group of artists including Barbara Stevini, John Latham, Anna Ridley, Barry Flannagan, David Hall and Jeffrey Shaw, the APG placed artists into companies and social service agencies for two decades.
The APG sought to promote the production of art in the spaces of everyday life, where it could make an impact. Its stated aim – as outlined in a pamphlet created in 1969 and displayed in the main gallery of the exhibition – was to ‘persuade industrialists to take [artists] into their organisations and pay them as licensed opposition to currency dictatorship’.
Taking the notion of everyday life beyond the space of the street and collaborations with industry beyond simply support with the fabrication of their work, the APG promoted ‘interchange’ – conversations between artists, managers and workers.
We are told by an unnamed industrialist in the video Artists in the Works (1970), made for the APG by Paul Overy and located at the show’s entrance, that the British Steel Corporation has engaged in artist commissioning to open up ‘new capabilities’, to bring a ‘proper living artist in touch with the men’ and to ‘pioneer new innovations’.
Across the various documents pinned onto archive boards and punched into binders, the APG characterises the role of the artist as outsider and often neglected innovator, mediator and sage. As opposed to the industrialists, the group emphasises the importance of artists’ freedom in the face of corporate interests. Class polarities resonate throughout the first floor of the exhibition through letters and videos in which the APG attempts to gain entry to the corporations, and when it does, to seek out positive recommendations to open new doors and prove its effects to the Arts Council. The latter is a trope all too familiar to arts groups today.
Whether the projects proposed are attractive to industry (one letter from British European Airways suggests that the artist David Hall ‘would make a unique contribution’ to their image overseas) or dismissed entirely, as with George Levantis’s gesture of throwing his work overboard the ship upon which he was placed, the APG’s commitments to working in industry are varied and come across as extremely individualised.
Pandering to capitalists
Wary of co-option, however, and in response to critiques from social organisations that it was pandering to the desires of capitalists, in the 1970s the APG turned much of its attention to working with social service organisations. Documents and remnants pertaining to this work are seen on the second floor of Raven Row and mark two divergent strategies in the group.
In a room dedicated to Ian Breakwell’s placement in the Department of Health and Social Security, visitors can peruse proposals for a ‘reminiscence aid’ in which sounds and slides created by artists are used to trigger the memories of people with dementia.
Another room, in which the artist Roger Coward works with the Department of Environment to conduct an inner area study of Birmingham, takes a different approach in working with residents, young people and others to create video documents of the impossibilities of accessing public services and instigating neighbourhood improvements. Echoing movements for popular education, militant research and other bottom-up approaches from the time, these documents were, first, for the use of residents to reflect and analyse their environment and formulate demands and, second, presented to officials at the ministry to instigate concrete change.
This archive seems like an appropriate and important point on which to end the exhibition, replacing the autonomy of the singular artist with that of the artists working in solidarity with others. It illuminates a possible path for the claims that artists might make against their marginalisation in cuts to cultural funding. Artistic autonomy without strong social alignments ends up supporting the very thing it seeks to resist.
The Individual and the Organisation: Artist Placement Group 1966-79 is on at Raven Row, London E1, until 16 December

Live art: In here or out there?

admin — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 10:00:03 +0000

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Fase: four movements to the music of Steve Reich Photo: Hugo Glendinning
Tate Modern’s ‘the Tanks’ are a pair of vast cylindrical spaces buried beneath the surface of London’s South Bank. They are intended to be ‘the world’s first museum galleries permanently dedicated to exhibiting live art’. Currently only open until October, this industrial Batcave will become the Tate’s ‘permanent home’ for live art, a gesture that it hopes will foreground both its acknowledgement of the increasing role that performance is playing within the domain of the gallery and the value it places in such work.
There’s a lot that is brilliant in all of this, not least the arrival of a fascinating new space on London’s performance landscape. On my first visit the band Factory Floor is playing a reassuringly loud ambient set from the middle of the room, an ocean of noise moving back and forth on the pull of some invisible tide. Everything feels thrillingly vibrant; concrete, noise and bodies moving in the darkness. This is a venue that feels important; a place with enough gravity and scale to finally bury Ekow Eshun’s notoriously feeble assertion that live art ‘lacks cultural urgency’ under its many tons of concrete and steel.
However there is something in the way this project has been framed that doesn’t feel right; something about that phrase ‘permanent home’, which already sounds like a carefully chosen euphemism for incarceration. It’s interesting that Adrian Searle, writing in the Guardian, unconsciously associates the opening of the Tanks with the emergence of Marina Abramovic as a monumental international presence, chiselling out a space for performance art within the authorised canon of art history.
Both the Tanks and Abramovic’s numerous recent projects are quite explicitly engaged in the task of creating a legitimised space for live art. A ‘dedicated space’, as the Tate calls it. Yet I can’t help wonder if, perhaps unconsciously, this seeming generosity isn’t in part motivated by institutional anxiety and medial panic around performance’s error-strewn otherness, its slippery relationship to authorship and originality, its theatrical unreliability. As long as live art is in here, it is not out there.
Uncomfortable clothes
I think live art stands uncomfortably in such formal clothes. Recently Live Art UK, a network of organisations of which I am a small part, hosted a large event at the Battersea Arts Centre entitled ‘Waking Up in Someone Else’s Bed’ that brought together organisations and individuals associated with live art from across the UK. Perhaps the most striking thing about it was the number of times people attempted to distance themselves from the term ‘live art’, from Louise Jeffreys of the Barbican to Helen Marriage of Artichoke. I don’t find this particularly surprising given that a number of the organisations that make up Live Art UK are similarly reticent about labelling what they do. The assumption that live art is a coherent set of practices, or even a stable community of artists, is always fraught and problematic, loaded with generalisations that rightly make people feel uncomfortable.
For me, and I think for a lot of artists and other organisations in Live Art UK, live art is perhaps best understood not as a single discipline but instead a shared set of preoccupations that reoccur across a range of disciplines. I’ve always thought of live art less as the kind of label stitched in the back of a jumper, determining ownership and singularity, and more like the kind of label you add to a blog; non-exclusive, non-hierarchical, a way of drawing together many varied things that share something important in common.
Considered in those terms the idea of building a dedicated home for live art strikes me as the least interesting thing you could do for it. I don’t think live art needs the particular kind of legitimacy that the Tate and Marina Abramovic are trying to impose upon it. For me, live art thrives as a way of talking across disciplines; a means of drawing together disparate artists and even more disparate artworks around their shared fascination with bodies and liveness and time. I hope that live art might be a way of challenging those artists and challenging the assumption that art can ever function as a series of discrete disciplines.
I’m interested to see how the Tate chooses to navigate its way through the cat-herding process of defining and documenting this most elusive of genres. How can such an institution represent a set of disciplines so implicitly associated with resistance to the strictures of an institution?
Less than two weeks prior to the opening of the Tanks, the group Liberate Tate performed an audacious and beautiful piece of performance by reassembling the blade of a wind turbine in the cavernous turbine hall of the Tate Modern and presenting it as a gift to the organisation. Their purpose was to use the elusive, uncontainable spectacle of live performance to highlight the Tate’s ongoing and deeply problematic relationship with oil firm BP. The performance demonstrated not only the subversion that remains an integral part of live art but also the challenge faced by the Tate in attempting to reproduce such a quality when it remains bound to sponsors like BP.
It is telling that until very recently the Tanks were called ‘the Oil Tanks’. The quiet deletion of a word is not enough to delete the problem. This is a home in which some won’t be welcome and others won’t want to live.
Amidst the pine trees
Still thinking about a home for live art, I found myself in a forest near Gloucester, standing amidst the pine trees at In Between Time’s ‘Up to Nature’. I was moved and startled and filled with wonder. I heard people telling stories, I saw people cutting down and rebuilding trees, I saw dancers dancing silently as darkness settled around us like snow. I got my hair cut while I listened to the Troggs. I climbed a very tall tree. And drunk and lost at 3am in the morning I stumbled into a glade full of electronic fireflies.
Yet none of this work felt disparate. While all wildly different, these musicians, dancers, writers and performers felt like they shared a way of considering this landscape and our fraught relationship to it. A longing that was connected to bodies and time and how we live and how we might live better.
I wonder if that slightly elusive element they all shared might be something we could call live art. And I wonder if this might be the best kind of home for live art; undedicated, impermanent, belonging to other people or even belonging to no one. In fact, no real home at all.
A shorter version of this article appeared in Exeunt magazine

Manifesta 9: Genk

louise — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 12:40:44 +0000

Photo: Yohan Creemers/Flickr

Why trail across the Channel on the train to Brussels in early September, only to then hang around waiting at empty stations for a connection to Genk? My depression was compounded by a lovely September day in London being replaced by mist, low grey clouds, cold and rain. Everyone had said that Genk has very lovely buildings. They were mistaken; the destination was not Ghent, but Genk.

Leaving the train at the end of the line, I was slightly surprised to be accompanied by some North African families, probably now a common sight through most of Western Europe. But my surprise was further increased when descending to the bus station; it was as if I had arrived in London. All the students and kids getting on and off of buses were the same ethnic and cultural mix found in any London college. This was certainly not my image of Belgium and particularly not of Flanders.

In early August an adulatory review of an exhibition being hosted in a mining town in Eastern Belgium, had galvanised me to take a look. Manifesta is a biennial European wide contemporary art exhibition, which locates in different parts of Europe with different themes every two years. This year was coal mining and appropriately it was housed in an old coal-mine building in Limburg, closed 20 years ago.

The exhibition was in an exceptionally fine listed building, a large and very imposing Art Deco building, (looking more like a mill), which has been entirely stripped inside. On entering, the very first exhibit seen was a large carpet laid out across the empty space. It is composed of the loaned prayer mats from the local Muslim population – miners or their families. Who were these particular miners, here in eastern Belgium?

But adding to my surprise or confusion, the town itself was no old mining town, but a new town. No terraced housing, no bleak recreation grounds, no slag heaps. Gradually as I pieced together this population and this town, it became clear that this was a very different mining community from those found in Britain, and probably most of Europe. In the mid 20s a French man invested in the area and opened the mine but the local Flemish population would not work for him. Miners came from other parts of Europe; France, Italy, Poland, Greece, Turkey and North Africa, and these were the original workers who came and stayed. Genk has grown from the village of around 450 farmers and agricultural workers to a new planned town of 65,000 miners, housed in semidetached dwellings with gardens, following the model of the Letchworth Garden City.

The exhibition was in no way celebrating nostalgia, any sort of sanitised collective memory nor an anaesthetising experience. It was a wonderful mixture of displays, paintings and installations laid out on the spacious empty floors of the disused and gutted mine building. The first stages were finely selected exhibits from the local mine itself: the prayer mats, original small models of complex geological structures used by the engineers to teach new miners the ways to shore up roofs and passage ways, a display of the original work books of the miners, an exhibit of the 1966 strike when in the face of possible closure the miners occupied the mine and the police brutally attacked, killing two miners and wounding many.

The floors above were areas where the curators had obtained paintings and drawings of coal and mines from many areas of Europe, with a large collection from the UK. But it was also the areas where contemporary art pieces were displayed, artists having been commissioned or asked to loan pieces in response to the overall theme of coal mining and its industrial processes. It ranged from the homage to Marcel Duchamps’ Coal Sacks Ceiling (1200 coal sacks that he had hung from the ceiling of the Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme in 1938 Paris) with a huge number of hanging coal sacks in a dark area of the space, to ways that coal had affected the landscape. There were paintings and documents identifying pollution or the impact of industrial processes with Stakhanovite posters from the Soviet Union. The film by Jeremy Deller and Mike Figgis of the battle of Orgreave and a television film of Tony Harrison reading V, the poem in which he responds to the graffiti on his parents’ grave in Leeds with his recognition of Thatcher’s attack on the miners and the organised working class, and skilled work itself. One of the most stunning pieces is that by a Chinese artist Ni Haifeng, Para-Production. In a space, almost the size of a chapel, there is a mini mountain of fabric off cuts, about 15 or more sewing machines to the side and at the back a huge sewn tapestry made from similar waste. Production, commodities, and recreation?

In its statement Manifesta stated that it was always keen to ‘witness its own transformation, testing different forms of processes, artistic practices and curatorial approaches’, while obsessively looking for the new. ‘The Deep of the Modern’, the title of this exhibition, makes reference to the modernistic capacity to go back to a time before its starting point, intending to reinvigorate or renovate itself. This mixture of art works and objects from various periods and various places within the site of an empty mine building, and from which you can see the newly painted white pit head standing straddling other mine buildings, is a constant questioning about what coal is in this place, not just what has happened in Genk but in other places within Europe, and what will replace this type of production and under what circumstances – questions which are important and timely.

www.catalog.manifesta9.org

Off with their heads! An interview with Martin Rowson

admin — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 20:02:11 +0000

‘I thought it was finally time to come out of the closet and admit that I’m a poet,’ Rowson declares, with his tongue firmly in his cheek. His new book The Limerickiad clearly sets out to deflate grandiose literary pretensions, as is evident from the blurb: ‘a series of bad jokes, cheap puns, strained scansion, excruciatingly contrived rhymes and pure filth’. ‘It’s very important to take the piss,’ he explains. ‘It’s one of our most important protections against tyranny.’
The title evokes the mock-epic, echoing Alexander Pope’s poem The Dunciad, one more instance of Rowson’s obvious fascination with the 18th century (having previously illustrated Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels). ‘I have great regard for the 1700s,’ he admits, ‘although I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to have lived in London back then – before the advent of proper public sanitation and the flush toilet.’
The cartoonist’s trade – which Rowson sees as akin to daily visual journalism – is described as a highly democratic, levelling sort of activity in which the great and the good are brought abruptly down to earth.
‘I find it totally outrageous and disgusting how these people act. All this hierarchy, these hypocrites and parasites, pretending they bear some great wisdom and are somehow better fitted to rule than the rest of us. They deserve anything that I can possibly throw at them.’
If this begins to sound like he’s on a moral crusade, he abruptly lightens the tone. ‘You can work some very funny jokes out of disgust and fury – that’s a power we have over them. Don’t underestimate the power of being able to laugh at the fuckers.’
What to draw and when
That said, Rowson is clear that freedom of speech does not absolve the cartoonist of the responsibility for judging what to draw and when. While no forms of authority are to be declared ‘off-limits’, the power to ridicule must be exercised judiciously. He is fond of the describing the task of the satirist as ‘afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted’.
So Rowson has no time for the ‘freedom of speech’ justification in the context of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten’s publication of a series of images mocking the Prophet Muhammad. ‘You have to question the motives behind this commission, and to bear in mind the context of years of anti-immigrant propaganda in Denmark. There was no real point behind publishing this stuff other than to feed this victimisation of a minority. Equally, though, it was only weeks later that some Danish Muslim clerics seized on these images and used them to solidify their own power base, and this stuff went global as all manner of religious fanatics whipped themselves up.’
This kind of outraged sense of victimhood can be a powerful weapon to silence debate. ‘The Israel lobby is particularly masterful in using this to silence criticism of their brutally oppressive colonialism. I’ve fallen foul of it a number of times – really unpleasant stuff, even death threats. I drew one cartoon for the Guardian which had the boot of an Israeli soldier stamping on a dove of peace after it had left Noah’s ark. Then I had a stream of abuse from a Zionist group which accused me of anti-semitism.
‘[One man] said the animals in the picture were specifically referenced in the biblical text – it’s a calculated insult to the Jews. I’d already anticipated this line of attack so had deliberately thrown in a few more for good measure. So I said, perhaps you would be so kind as to point me to the biblical references to the beavers, the orang-utan, the walrus and the okapi – a species first identified at the turn of the last century. At which point he accused me of being in denial about my anti-semitism!
‘You can’t win – it’s the ultimate trump card. No matter how many innocent people the Israeli state kills, any criticism is automatically proof of anti-semitism. No wonder idiots like Ahmadinejad want to deny the holocaust. They are jealous. They’d love to silence their critics like that.’
Editorial control
How much freedom from editorial control does the cartoonist have? ‘We [Martin and his colleague Steve Bell] are lucky on the Guardian. We get a free hand, basically. Steve is more hardline than I am, he won’t consult the editors, just delivers his stuff. I tend to outline my intentions in case there is an obvious clash with the column below or something. Generally, we operate on the basis of a kind of internal self‑censoring, bearing in mind what our readers will be able to stomach.
‘But I have resigned in the past where I felt that an editorial line was being imposed. I remember during the Iraq war I worked for Scotland on Sunday, whose editor was in favour of the war while I was very much against. Every Friday we’d have the battle of Stalingrad – not with the editor, but between me and his deputy, who would relay the orders. I’d say “Kindly tell the editor I am not illustrating his editorial!” They’d never tell a columnist what to write. I ended up saying, “If the editor has such good ideas can I recommend that he learns how to draw.”’
Asked about relations with his fellow cartoonists, Rowson says: ‘I’ve been in this game a long time – I got my first break for the New Statesman when I was 23. And for the first four or five years I never met a single other cartoonist. And when I finally I did I found that they had a particular pride in being extremely unfriendly. There was a code where you were expected to be a misanthropic bigamist drunk.
‘But they’re quite a good bunch these days. There’s an unwritten rule where when one of us lands on a particular trope – like Steve did when he first drew John Major with his underpants, or started drawing [George W] Bush as a monkey, which was just so right and so funny – the rest of us would say “that’s Steve’s thing” and “leave it”.
‘And we’ll discuss problems. Like Ken Clarke. There’s so much of him it’s really hard to know where to start and finish. I mean, there are a whole host of cabinet ministers who you’d like the take the piss out of but can’t. No-one would recognise Grant Shapps. You’d have to put him in a t-shirt with his name blazoned across the front, which kind of misses the point.’
Puppets and pampered kids
He gets fired up again on the subject of the coalition government: ‘I’m developing this narrative where the Lib Dems are basically puppets – like Danny Alexander as Beaker [from the Muppets] – while the Tories are just pampered kids.
‘David Cameron came easily after a few false starts. When he first stood for the leadership I just had all the candidates being measured up for coffins! He was the one in a suit looking impatiently at his watch. But I kept seeing how pink and shiny his face was and I thought he’s like Little Lord Fauntleroy. So he’s got smaller and smaller. And Osborne is like a public school bully with a permanent cocky sneer.’
‘It’s incredible. They’ve no real principles, no coherent policies to speak of, no thought-out plan. They just think it’s natural that they’re in charge because it’s what they were born into. It’s like an 11-year-old boy just petulantly hitting a machine with a mallet and hoping that’s enough to fix it.
‘Look at Osborne. He’s morally, culturally, socially ill-equipped for the job, utterly vacuous. Maybe we should be pleased he’s there because it shows how useless these aristocratic twats really are. We should have a Committee of Public Safety like in the French Revolution and chop their heads off!’ And on that insurrectionary note, Rowson laughs uproariously and disappears back to his drawing board.
Martin Rowson’s latest publication The Limerickiad, an illustrated history of world literature in limerick form, is out now

Fox among the paintings

admin — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 09:14:00 +0000

Close up: three union jacks wave vigorously in the blustery British winds. Traditional classical music chimes, staccato beat travelling across the air as your brain tries to align the rhythm of the music to the images of the flags. A voice rings out in an urgent tone, primed with dramatic pause and rhetorical flourishes.
The originality of approach in the BBC series on British modernism, British Masters, is obvious from the opening scene. If television documentaries are sometimes criticised for refusing to risk alienating their audiences by taking a controversial stance, British Masters staunchly refuses to play to the crowd. Because impressionism, cubism, surrealism, and abstract expressionism are now conventionally popular and often featured on television, they are either sidelined or dismissed in favour of a very British tradition.
Indeed, if you watched the series, you would know we Brits have a lot to wave our union jacks about in terms of our national artistic legacy – ‘one of the greatest artistic movements in all of western culture,’ according to presenter Dr James Fox. Almost every painting the series looks at is ‘the work of a genius’, or ‘probably one of the greatest ever’. Excitingly, this very British art is not only of the finest aesthetic quality but also has a profound social value. Before the second world war it prophesised what was to come; afterwards it demonstrated what it was to be ‘British’.
Miraculously, Fox sees no disjunction between his revisionist mission to reclaim British modernism from its undeserving omission from our museums, television programmes and art history books on the one hand and the power of the claims he makes about it on the other. British modernist art was always undervalued, yet simultaneously influential enough to ‘define for a nation what Britishness was’ (the concept of what British identity and nationality is or was or means is never problematised in the programme itself).
Some of the artists in the programme – Sickert, Hamilton, and Hockney for example – are extremely famous in Britain today, but not as part of a very British lineage. Fox’s refusal to acknowledge David Blomberg’s debt to cubism, Sickert’s debt to Degas, or Hamilton and Hockney’s debt to Warhol and US pop art is symptomatic of the presenter’s unfortunate predilection for following his own agenda with, at times, little regard for the facts.
As John Preston from the Telegraph aptly points out, when Fox discusses Mark Gertler’s ‘The Merry-Go-Round’: ‘[He] gave the clear impression that this was painted in 1914 and was “a dark and brutal vision of the future, a premonition of Britain trapped in the insanity of a never-ending war”. But “The Merry-Go-Round”, as Fox must – or should – have been aware, was actually painted in 1916.’
Good visual analysis is marred by Fox’s compulsive exaggeration. In a scene showing shots of Stanley Spencer’s incredible Sandham memorial paintings, painted hands become a ‘handshake between the past and the future’.
The striking subjectivity of these analyses is accounted for by Fox’s own motivations for making the programme: ‘A few years ago I was at a conference on 20th century painting. As I queued up for a coffee in the canteen I overheard a French historian describe Britain as “the land without modern art”. His friends all laughed in agreement. I was livid. And ever since I’ve been determined to prove them wrong.’
Personal vendetta is supplemented by cliché and stereotypes. Brits love an underdog, which is why we also love British modernism. British art is tasteful and ‘understated’ – like us Brits. It’s figurative and painterly too: well-made and dependable, like a good piece of British manufacturing. Like the ‘golden age’ of the British empire, for Fox modernism was a unique chapter in British art, after which standards have seriously slipped.
Contemporary art is narrowly defined as the populist stuff of the YBAs (Young British Artists) Hirst and Emin, and dismissed for valuing celebrity and concepts above craftsmanship. Foreigners are inferior, women artists non-existent and all mediums bar painting obsolete. The internationality of the art world and the great work in photography, video and net art, much of which is highly valued outside the realms of the cynical art market, are invisible to Fox.
Dramatic in tone, music and visually (in one scene Fox presents the programme clad only in a towel!), British Masters is the opposite of the qualities he claims to admire so much. It’s brash, overstated, undignified and its argument in bad taste. Rather than genuinely championing a repressed branch of history, the series is the epitome of television as populist medium par excellence.
Popular opinion is attacked in a hyperbolically personal style instead of well-considered argument and evidence. The central thesis of British Masters becomes a populist argument against populism – and if you believe in the power of television to form as well as reflect popular opinion, it is one based on worryingly reactionary and conservative principles.

The ladder of escape

admin — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 04:14:09 +0000

Joan Miró’s art has long proven popular for its vivid colour and its wilfully primitive and frequently playful style, sometimes mistaken for whimsy. His work is often cited to demonstrate the influence of surrealism on painting and sculpture, and his influence can also be felt in the emergence of abstract expressionism in post-war America. But the particular value of this retrospective at Tate Modern – the first in Britain for more than 50 years – is that it allows a certain distance from these art historical labels. It permits us to view the work afresh, in the context of the artist’s engagement with the problematics of place, politics and imagination over six decades.
Above all, the curators restore the signficance of Miró’s native Catalonia in the development of his identity as an artist. His fascination with the land and the labour of those who have shaped it, and with the sun and the sky, which colour the dreams of its people, lies at the core of Miró’s art. Producers and dreamers, rooted but transcendent, belonging but also escaping, the Catalan peasants figure as the very model of artistic production. The visual co‑ordinates of Miró’s imagination – the insistence of the vertical axis (the ladder as a literal and metaphorical presence; the orientation to the sky, the sun, birds and stars) – are bound up with the lived experience of a place and its people.
In this sense, one of the most dramatic paintings in the exhibition is The Two Philosophers (above), which dates from 1936, the year that saw the reactionary onslaught on the Spanish Republic commence. If the world is to be set aright, it seems to suggest, the ideas of those who have floated free from the conditions of material reproduction must be radically overturned and realigned with the perspective of those with a better grounding in reality.
Alongside his (no longer existing) mural The Reaper – originally displayed alongside Picasso’s Guernica at the Republican Pavilion of the Exposition Internationale in Paris – and the print of a poster (Aidez l’Espagne, opposite) produced on the same occasion to raise money for the Republican cause, this is perhaps when Miró’s political commitment is most explicit in his art. The political tenor is still unmistakable in the Barcelona lithographs produced after Franco’s dictatorship was established, although the mood of these monochrome images is understandably much darker. Their images of looming monsters and scary authority figures can also be read at a psychoanalytic level, in terms of anxiety in the face of the castrating father and also as evidence (in their compulsive repetition) of trauma.
But it would be a mistake to believe that Miró’s work leaves behind political engagement in the wake of Franco’s victory. Indeed, in exile the critical negativity of the artwork, its capacity to reshape elements of the world into an alternative order that stands apart and reveals the contingency of the world as we experience it, takes on a renewed urgency. But the artist faces a constant struggle to prevent this negative space from being eroded by forces of commodification and recuperation by the bourgeois institutions.
Miró spoke of his ambition as nothing less than the ‘assassination of painting’ and experimented with the physical destruction of the art work (burning, scratching and staining the canvas) as a dialectical move in the re-affirmation of its critical potentiality. The triptych Hope for a Condemned Man (1974), which Miró linked to the imprisonment and death by garroting of 25-year-old anarchist Salvador Puig Antich by the Franco regime for allegedly killing a policeman, is all the more striking for its abstraction. Pared back to something approaching minimalism, the purity of its primary colours balanced against the dirty and stained canvas, it seems at once to gesture towards a moment of utopian transcendence and berate itself for being unable to realise the potential that it appears to hold out.
At Tate Modern until 11 September 2011

AgiTate

admin — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 17:00:56 +0000

Beginning in May 2010, in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, art activists Liberate Tate staged a dramatic series of performances in cultural institutions to protest against oil companies such as BP and Shell sponsoring gallery spaces. Gushing from floral skirts, spilling elegantly from giant white eggs, jetting from paint tubes across the floor of the iconic Tate Turbine Hall, the flood of oily resistance that followed has generated a fierce debate in the art world around oil, ethics and sponsorship.

Working in association with Platform and Art Not Oil, these performance-interventions have been documented in the postcard pack ‘Liberate Tate: Collected Works 2010’. The sales of these packs are being used to fund a participatory event/exhibition in an art space in 2011 that will provide a space for planning more actions of creative resistance.

‘As crude oil continues to devastate coastlines and communities in the Gulf of Mexico, BP executives will be enjoying a cocktail reception with curators and artists at Tate Britain. These relationships enable big oil companies to mask the environmentally destructive nature of their activities with the social legitimacy that is associated with such high‑profile cultural associations.’
A letter in the Guardian signed by 171 people in the art world on the day of the Tate summer party celebrating 20 years of BP sponsorship

‘We are seeing a terrifyingly high rate of cancer in Fort Chipewyan where I live. We are convinced that these cancers are linked to the Tar Sands development on our doorstep. It is shortening our lives. That’s why we no longer call it “dirty oil” but “bloody oil”. The blood of Fort Chipewyan people is on these companies’ hands.’
George Poitras, a former chief of Mikisew Cree First Nation, Canada, attending the BP annual general meeting in 2010

The ‘Liberate Tate: Collected Works 2010’ postcard books are available at the online New Internationalist shop, or you can send £5 on Paypal to kevin@platformlondon.org
If you would like to be involved with Liberate Tate, email liberatetate@gmail.com

Banners high

admin — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 13:52:33 +0000

The Pits and the Pendulums
Andrew Turner
National Coal Mining Museum, Wakefield
Andrew Turner is Britain’s foremost commissioned painter of trade union banners. His creations are not in the familiar conventional style, with depictions of union leaders and the simple imagery of brother workers shaking hands, women representing Justice or Liberty, or stairways to socialist paradise.
Turner’s work is intensely political, containing symbolism of such power that his banner for North Selby branch of the National Union of Mineworkers in Yorkshire was banned from the pit-head by British Coal management in the late 1980s because it was ‘too provocative’.
Turner created the banner after the miners’ strike against pit closures of 1984-85. It depicts pitmen pushing against a gravestone as it is forced down on them by mounted police. Central is a fallen miner. To his left are key figures representing the forces aligned against the striking miners: Margaret Thatcher, financiers, lawyers and media barons.
There is anger in much of Turner’s work. And often there is dark humour. In my own home hangs a print of one of his drawings – two miners dancing a jig, arm in arm, laughing. Its title is The nation mourns the death of Churchill.
Attempts to borrow one banner for this exhibition, The Pits and the Pendulums: coal miners versus free markets, failed. The former GMWU Manchester 115 branch banner is affectionately known as ‘The Hulk’. It depicts a muscular worker tearing chains apart with his hands. The union said that with forthcoming battles expected over government attacks on public services, the banner would be needed on the streets, not in an exhibition. Such is the current relevance of Turner’s work.
Born in 1939, Turner began to draw as a boy, sitting beneath the kitchen table of his home in Stoneyburn, West Lothian, Scotland, where his father was a miner. Around the table in the 1940s, miners discussed the pit, the union, politics, socialism, communism. His uncle was a founding member of the Communist Party in Scotland.
Turner, now 70 and living in Leeds, did not follow his father down the pit. He worked as a trawlerman, then attended Edinburgh College of Art.
Political activity saw him expelled. In 1962 he led a march on the city’s US consulate during the Cuban missile crisis – the clash between the US and the Soviet Union that could have sparked nuclear war. He was told he had ‘brought the college into disrepute’. He attended Leeds College of Art, then the Royal Academy in London, where he was president of the students’ union.
His diploma piece at the RA was the arresting Black Friday Triptych (pictured above), portraying the miners’ disputes of the 1920s, involving solidarity, betrayal, success and defeat, and connecting them to the strikes of 1972 and 1974. The painting also augured the 1984-85 strike against pit closures. Turner refers to it as a warning. Black Friday has been loaned to the exhibition by the South Wales area of the National Union of Mineworkers.
Another darkly allegorical yet vibrant exhibit is a banner made for the Leeds branch of the train drivers’ union Aslef. Nick Whitehead, Yorkshire regional organiser of the union, said: ‘There were gasps when it was unveiled at our club in Leeds.’
Turner, who has created two dozen banners, most taking at least a year to complete, is currently working on a new banner for the Women Against Pit Closures movement. The exhibition runs until January 23, and entry is free.