‘Regard all art critics as useless and dangerous’ – Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto
Tania Kovats’ Oceans (Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh)
‘The creative interest in the sea has not been restricted to the ancient aquatic myths of Gilgamesh, Oisín or Tarō, but has carried on into the modern age. When Joseph Conrad turned his attention to the genocidal imperial crimes in Africa, he did so via an ivory boat venturing deep into the Congo. When Herman Melville wrote his epic on God, America, commerce and mad vengeful ambition, he set it on a whaling ship in the Atlantic. In 1842, JMW Turner claimed he had himself tied to the mast of a ship for four hours during a heavy storm, like Odysseus resisting the Sirens in Homer’s Odyssey. The result was a painting (Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth), but just as importantly it was the creation of a form of legend, happening just far enough over the horizon to remain convincing. With revolutions in transport and travel and the predominant move to urban living, it would appear the sea has lost its primacy in our imaginations. A romance, steeped in truth, fiction and more accurately the indefinable merging of the two, seems to have slipped away. Tania Kovats’ exhibition Oceans returns something of this lost allure…’
Matisse’s The Cut-Outs (Tate Modern, London)
‘Everyone knows Matisse is all about joy: the joy of dance, colour and life. Though this is self-evident and rightly celebrated, it is a mistake just to accept it or to move on without asking, what is this joy? The standard response would be a synonym (vitality, perhaps) that would add little to an understanding of any real depth. Instead, let’s consider joy as a form of defiance, in the face of grave illness and mortality. Given three years to live (he would survive for more than a decade), Matisse was wheelchair-bound when he created these works. Their very existence is owed to the fact he could no longer paint as he once could. Instead, with assistance, he sculpted in 2D with scissors and paper, or as he called it, “carving into colour”. The results, as authoritatively and delightfully shown in this exhibition, were bold, spirited and inventive, as many critics have attested. To separate them from the impending darkness, however, is to insist on enjoying fireworks in broad daylight. Life, they suggest, is a miracle not just in spite of its transience but because of it. Even the form is one of impermanence; flimsy materials pinned together rather than fixed. They will not last but, for the moment, crucially they do.’
Mathieu Pernot’s The Crossing (Jeu de Paume, Paris)
‘Since the present recession began in the west, several political narratives have successfully been pushed to the fore to absolve those guilty of financial malpractice and facilitate the calculated swingeing cuts that have supposedly balanced the books. The most emotive of these myths is also the oldest – the demonisation of “the other”. If immigrants didn’t exist to scapegoat, it would be necessary to invent them.’
Van Gogh & Artaud (Musée d’Orsay, Paris).
‘For a long time, pure linear painting drove me mad until I met Van Gogh, who painted neither lines nor shapes, but inert things in nature as if they were having convulsions,” Artaud wrote. This would be expected in a place of hedonistic abandon such as The Dance Hall in Arles (1888), much less in the placid wallpapered surrounds of his Augustine Roulin portrait, but it is there still. Even painting landscapes, especially painting landscapes, these “convulsions” are evident. As attempts at tranquillity, they are failures just as much as they are monumental triumphs of art. The whirling, churning effect of the wind on the clouds, trees and wheat fields (best shown in Country Road in Provence By Night, 1890) is wonderful until we consider that those days may have been entirely free from any breeze. After all, Van Gogh’s Church at Auvers (1890) is similarly sublimely warped. What hope did mere humans have when the mind could do this to cathedrals of solid stone?’
Nika Autor: Newsreel – The News Is Ours (Paris)
‘In his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Walter Benjamin turned his attention to Paul Klee’s 1920 print Angelus Novus, which he interpreted as the angel of history. “His face is turned toward the past,” Benjamin wrote, “Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet […] This storm is what we call progress.”
Slava Klavora was one figure swept up in the wreckage of history. A Slovene freedom fighter, she was arrested by the Gestapo, tortured and executed, becoming in death a heroine of Marshal Tito’s Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Following the dissolution of the communist state and the tempestuous advent of capitalism, the artist and fellow Maribor resident Nika Autor re-examines where Klavora, and indeed all of us, stand amidst the march of supposed progress. Curated by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez as part of the Satellite programme, Newsreel – The News Is Ours is poignant, disturbing and ultimately inspiring; linking a triptych of troubled eras, and the light that brave individuals and collective action might salvage from the darkness…’
Robert Adams: The Place We Live (Paris)
‘We have erected drive-in cafes where the buffalo once roamed, to say nothing of the dinosaurs. In a confession, to ourselves primarily… we might say: “Well, we’re human, what else could we do?” […] Here, the purpose was not art or communication with some celestial being, but straightforward brute commerce. Adams cannot help but capture the beauty of the scenes of destruction because, worryingly for us, they are beautiful.’
Patrick Scott: Image Space Light (Dublin)
‘The closest Patrick Scott came to disrupting his unfailing sense of harmony was with his Devices series. Created in an age when the nuclear obliteration of the human race was a distinct possibility, Scott’s paintings were notably detached works, all the more eerie because of their circuitous route to protest. The term “terrible beauty” has been much overused since Yeats coined it, but there is something both disturbing and alluring about Scott’s renderings of atomic explosions. It is not simply the realisation that the aesthetics of the sublime exist in the apocalyptic; this was known and explored aeons before physicists split the atom. It is the strange divinity involved; the idea that we are uncovering the secrets of the universe and we are seeing too much in the process. It constitutes a modern day Promethean tragedy. Scott’s paintings are charged through their careful indistinctness. Purple Device (1963) appears to be based on Harold Edgerton’s rapatronic photographs of H-bomb fireballs, but it could equally be the formation of a new planet. Bronze Device (1964) insinuates the sun and the spilling of blood, as well as a nuclear airburst. All life, we are reminded, comes from the fission involved, and all life may well go out that way. Genesis is wedded irrevocably to Revelation.’
Gustave Doré: Master of Imagination (Paris)
‘There is a prevailing illusion that the imagery we associate with characters in certain novels comes primarily from the connection between the writer’s words and the reader’s imagination. With the classics, we often have the imagery before the reading, thanks to the afterlife of the original illustrations. There is no artist who has engineered more characters whom we believe we have conjured up ourselves from print than Gustave Doré. If we imagine Don Quixote, Little Red Riding Hood, Baron Münchhausen, Puss in Boots or the Ancient Mariner now in our mind’s eye, the chances are that what we are seeing bears the hallmarks of Doré. His talent for the iconic has extended his influence to unexpected places. Owls (1879) resembles an early Disney still and his vision of Dante and Virgil lit from a crypt below has reappeared in countless horror films. His genius for scenes of frozen motion, from Don Quixote and Rocinante being acrobatically felled by a windmill to Satan being cannoned out of Heaven, suggest that Doré was creating films for the mind before there was celluloid.’
Raw Vision – Outsider Art (Paris)
‘To exhibit a diverse international range of singular artists under a category such as Art Brut or Outsider Art is to invite criticism. It would be easy, and perhaps facile, to claim the terms fetishize mental illness, make a virtue out of obscurity and a mascot out of, often unpleasant, personal circumstances. Such a ‘defence’ of the artists in question risks patronising them to the point of powerlessness. In truth, all artists are essentially outsider artists until they are brought inside, whether through commercial success, academic approval or critical acclaim. Raw Vision avoids any tiresome, paralysing arguments over voyeurism. Instead, as with the influential magazine it was born from, the curators of the exhibition rightly assume we’re all voyeurs and simply let the art and the artists speak. The results are frequently astonishing.’
América Latina 1960-2013 (Paris)
‘While every country, and indeed every citizen, had unique and multifaceted reactions to overarching military and economic events, the common trials faced give the collection a sense of a narrative thread. What unites them is not necessarily some order or unity we impose after the fact, but merely, and profoundly, that line that adorns one of Goya’s Disasters of War prints. “Yo lo vi.” (“I saw it.”) Each, in their radically different way, say to those in the future: “This happened.”’
David Lynch: Small Stories (Paris)
‘As a filmmaker, David Lynch has embraced the various Surrealist approaches, not least in the incongruous pairing of suburban banality with the esoteric, the unnerving and the violent. His depictions of the US often consist of kitsch soap-opera characters and an atmosphere of perpetual 1950s twilight, concealing the deep trauma of secrets and further, more diabolical depths. Yet for all the horror released in adapting Norman Rockwell paintings to purgatory, a mysterious and alluring poetry resonates in Lynch’s work. Well-worn genre cliches are revitalised by sudden irreconcilable occurrences outside the audience’s expectations: the severed ear in Blue Velvet, the “Red Room” in Twin Peaks and the “Lady in the Radiator” in Eraserhead. As with the Surrealists, we feel we have somehow been here before in dreams, to borrow the title from the Roy Orbison song that haunts Blue Velvet, and, it must be said, in nightmares.’
Project Space: Inverted House: Tina Gverović and Siniša Ilić (London)
‘Given that we are psychologically programmed to see patterns in randomness, it is little surprise that a wide array of artists have adapted this “apophenia” to aid their art. Most often this finds expression in forms of pareidolia, where human or animals are discerned in arbitrary shapes. In his notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci recommended that artists examine stains on walls and the textures of stones, and let their imagination run wild in interpreting resemblances. Salvador Dalí conjured up many of his surreal visions from the natural rock formations on the Cadaqués coast, and Max Ernst made pictures from rubbings of tree bark. It was an inspiring way of bypassing reason or, at the very least, predictability. Other artists conveyed the pareidolia directly to the audience; whether the distorted scale of halftone dots in Pop Art or the pointillism of that movement’s unwitting ancestor Georges Seurat. It is also a technique centrally and subtly employed in Tina Gverović and Siniša Ilić’s otherwise dramatic Project Space: Inverted House at Tate Modern, where the barest presence takes human form, a form perilously close to being erased.’
Thomas Bayrle: All In One (Gateshead)
‘In Walter Benjamin’s often-quoted but little-read The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), the writer bemoans the increasingly prevalent loss of the aura or authenticity of an object when it is replicated. Appropriately, Benjamin identifies that we are now locked within systems (a Bayrelian idea if ever there were one). He implies that some of this missing aura has been diverted into the way creative objects are produced and those who control those means (an idea tacitly endorsed by the current monopolising advances by gatekeepers such as Windows, Google and Spotify and their otherwise bewildering worship at the expense of what is now risibly labelled “content”). We might go further and claim that our lives have lost this “aura” or had it stolen. Even statements of defiance, however, are consumed in both senses of the word; either converted into harmless saleable wares or crushed, as evidenced in Bayrle’s General Electric (1970).’
Leonora Carrington: The Celtic Surrealist (Dublin)
‘A dream that is not interpreted is like a letter that is not opened,” as Freud, the Surrealists’ unwilling patron saint, once wrote. The domesticated skull and crossbones engraving, the upside-down eyeless reflection and the aged azure ghoul, as well as the title of A Warning to Mother (1973), seem to invite Freudian interpretation. Carrington’s paintings are more interesting and evasive though than textbook psychoanalysis. A much less-quoted Freud line is worth recalling: “In classic paintings, I look for the subconscious – in a Surrealist painting, for the conscious.” Carrington’s supposed secrets could well be games or ruses left for those who underestimate her, or even to undermine the assumptions of armchair psychiatrists. Looking closer at the ghoul, it is possible to see the figure as a representation of reason with a wristwatch, miniature pylon and telegraph wires embedded in its skull, bursting crooked and accusingly into the phantasmagoria, almost the way an art critic might.’
Eileen Gray: Architect Designer Painter (Dublin)
‘In David Eagleman’s series of thought experiments, Sum, the writer and neuroscientist proposes variations of the afterlife. In one, he suggests: “There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.” For many artists, fuelled by ambition and ego, the third death may be as terrifying as the first and the question of legacy must certainly cross every artist’s mind at some point. In this quietly triumphant exhibition by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, curated by Cloé Pitiot of the Pompidou Centre, there is a reference to how awareness of the extraordinary work of Eileen Gray (1879-1976) had “fallen almost entirely into oblivion”. How could such an innovative artist have almost been lost to us?’
Klara Lidén: The Myth of Progress (Dublin)
“We inhabit the megalopolis only to the extent that we declare it uninhabitable,” Jean-François Lyotard wrote in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. “Otherwise we are just lodged there.” It is a view that The Myth of Progress seems to confirm. Yet there is a commendably subversive streak in Lidén’s art that defies the pessimism that might accompany such a perspective. With its focus on liminal urban settings, her photographic series within the exhibition suggests that we have built environments around us where paradoxically humans do not fit. In Bowery (2012), a figure has climbed on to a street sign at an intersection; recalling the ghosts of the medieval damned said to be trapped for all eternity at crossroads. Rather than lapse into purgatorial despair, however, Lidén demonstrates that we can resist through small imaginative acts of revolt, or at least express our alienation. She does this with real humour; raising the question with Column Monkey (2013), if this is a concrete jungle, then why not approach it as a simian would? For all the comic effect, there is a distinct note of danger in the photographs. A person who ascended dilapidated structures or descended into manholes (Down, 2011) would soon incur public ridicule and the attention of the authorities, as well as the possibility of coming to physical harm. We may live in the city but we are forbidden from truly exploring it; bringing us back to Lyotard’s very pertinent distinction.
Moving Beyond: Painting in China 2013 (Edinburgh)
‘In the early 1930s, the poet and editor Ezra Pound coined the phrase that would become the maxim of Modernism: “Make it new.” In actuality, Pound had appropriated it from an archaic Chinese source; a bathtub inscription of a Shang dynasty emperor. Whatever Modernism was, it wasn’t strictly modern. The idea of history as an ever-upward process is largely a western delusion. Of the many aspects that the exceptional Moving Beyond – Painting in China 2013 exhibition explores, one of the most pertinent is that the past and our relationship to it are much more fluid than we usually think. Being partially a fiction we adapt in the present, the past changes. It also, in its half-forgotten innovations and side-roads, contains the future. As William Faulkner wrote, and these paintings reiterate: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Peter Doig: No Foreign Lands (Edinburgh)
‘Every landscape is a portrait of its viewer. In Doig’s scenes, you can view wonders or read foreboding auguries. It is Doig’s great strength to make these possible simultaneously. The paintings may inevitably be static, but the feelings they arouse are protean. On initial viewing, Cricket Painting (Paragrand) appears a relatively dynamic depiction of children at play. On further examination, it appears much less innocent; the ghostly semi-translucent figures seem eerie, like figures in a dream or conjured up in the miasma of memory. Doig has claimed that he rarely paints scenes directly, but uses found images, postcards and earlier sketches or photographs. In this sense then, these are ghosts he is painting. They, and the scenes they are in, have long disappeared by the time of painting. Change, whether it is the weather or light or human beings, is an unacknowledged presence continually at work…’
Picturing Derry (Derry)
‘Yet there are other aspects of the human spirit too easily missed in cursory news reports. There is an acknowledgement in the photographs of an uncomfortable truth for some; that this was, for many young people involved, an exciting time as well as a bleak one. It was, after all, their youth and the riots became something of a social event. It’s evident in Caron’s portrait of a young woman in the midst of a rubble-strewn battleground. She occupies the centre of the frame, her hair and dress in chic 60s fashion, an inquisitive look in her eye. It could be said to be a fashion shoot, which in a way it partially was. This explains why in the surge of the crowd captured by Caron, there are so many unique identifiable individuals, wearing effectively their Sunday best. There is no Guy Fawkes-mask anonymity here. They were here, partly, to impress and manifestly to stand out from the crowd.’