A particularly intriguing still life seen here.

Labels: crap, painting

Labels: David Shrigley, Marlene Dumas, painting

Painting's not the longest con in Western culture. That place would be reserved, I guess, for Jesus or something. But painting was used to make images lie. Its cheating and hoodwinking and lies continued unabated for hundreds of years, using pinholes and lenses and smoke and mirrors, giving artists a reputation for genius which was unachievable by a mere mortal, and giving art the elevated, hyperreal reputation it enjoys to this day, long after painting itself was exposed as a fraud.

Once its lies were exposed, painting became reviled among elevated artists the world over, with a reputation among art media somewhere near the reputation of Hitler among politicians. Not nice, not cool. Definitely not funny. Any self-respecting artist will tell you (quite often) that there is no justifiable reason for painting, ever. And in the same breath they are tacitly saying that there can be no possible justification because they can't think of one. Which is a big assumption to make. The kind of assumption that has caught people out again and again in the history of art. Never say ever.

Artists who are way too clever to ever say never have been painting for a while already. They use painting where it fits their concept, like in Jake and Dinos Chapman's 2005 show with my most favourite title ever (!): Like A Dog Returns To Its Vomit. Painting and drawing are used to take the piss out of painting and drawing... think + think = doublethink.

This is what thinking 'painters' of our time are doing. They don't explain it in words of one syllable because, as with all conceptual art, you are supposed think about it until you get the joke. But if you just can't do it, if the word 'painting' is JUST NOT FUNNY and you put all painters in the same bad box, then do remember that Vodacom ads are concepts, installations can be found at Morkel's furniture store, and Kevin Costner is a performance artist.

Labels: painting

Labels: painting

One of my favourite moments from the whole of art history is when Andy Warhol said “Do I have to do drips?”, thereby sweeping High Modernism into oblivion at one stroke, and sending Mark Rothko, who was religious about his drips, into a such a tailspin that he cut himself up and bled to death on his kitchen floor. More drips.

Not that Mark Rothko's hadn't alreadly had a few drip problems of his own. He suffered from impotence, which one can understand being a problem for any reasonably sensitive man living through High Modernism, as it was also High Freudianism, and the primary (sexual) drip was so deeply conflated with the secondary (painterly) drip that even a tap would be afraid it wasn't drippy enough.

After that the only thing that dripped for the next forty years or so was sarcasm, which is how long it took for High Modernism to start looking as funny to everyone else as it did to the Pop artists, and then the miraculous discovery was made that the drip could be sarcasm itself. Not just the pop-art drip, but the actual wet runny post-High Modernist drip.

And so emerged the current Era of Drippism, which is now at its Height. The drip is very interesting, because it signifies High Modernist emotion as a joke. Georgina Gratrix pointed this out brilliantly in her Drip Painting, which is a big painting full of long, long drips that each have a head with goggly eyes. Hello, Drips! And yet drips also signify real emotion, or trauma, or 'the real'. The real wet drip is a post-machine-age little message to the Pop artists that even though we would all love to be cool machines we really aren't.

Charles Saatchi's latest It Girl, Stella Vine, has so many drips that it looks like Charles probably picked her out by counting drips and she had the most. She also has an almost-real, fake-traumatic past as a sex worker, which started a whole chain of shouting that it's the 'confessional' drippiness of her real life that she's been chosen for, and not her painting which is crap (a bit like that other slag Tracey Emin, they yell). Here I think the shouters have a point: her painting is crap. Which is the problem with painting, in that unfortunately being able to make a good painting isn't helped at all by having real emotional trauma, or even by being a real drip. It's about knowing how to use that stuff. It's still artifice, same as it ever was, even though the High Modernists believed for a moment that it was real.

But the idea that art shouldn't be about whingeingly abject confession seems outdated somehow, like a Victorian throwback. Why not whinge? We're so BORED with being cool machines. We still have feelings, even though we mock them and we know they're not of the heroic order of High Masculinism. We also have sad things like child abuse (Penny Siopis) and the painful emotional risks of teen sex (Lisa Brice). We have these all over the world, even where Late Capitalist society runs smoothly like a cool machine. And then we have the places in the world, like the one we live in, where society does not run like a cool machine. Drip drip drip go the real blood and the tears that haven't even heard of High Modernism.

Which brings us to Mainland China, which has a history of emotional trauma on a scale of that defies comprehension. Now China is “Rising”, as the title of the show at 34 on Long implies, and one of the signs of this is that Chinese painting is bringing in big money. While there is interesting work to be found amongst the vast tsunami of new Chinese painting, there is also a whole lot of really cliched rehashing that comes across as tourist art with a Cultural Revolution theme. A kind of painted Chinese version of Che Guevara T-shirts. And a lot of this work is absolutely covered in drips: the global village signifier of painterly trauma.

It's at moments like this that Western cultural imperialism strikes me as the most cruel. Because it puts pressure on all cultures to demonstrate their modernity and sophistication in Western terms. And so these Chinese painters who are painting about seriously traumatic stuff try to make themselves look hip and contemporary by engaging in Drippism, which actually looks more convincing when coupled with the fake trauma of silly Stella Vine, even though her painting is easily as lousy as theirs. Why is this? Because the drips, like all contemporary art, are inextricably embedded in Western art history, which masquerades as a global language but actually generates huge imbalances. These imbalances are made painfully visible when it comes to the expression of non-Western realities like non-fake large-scale social trauma that will never be a funny pretention like High Modernist drips.

Labels: painting

P is for painting, and P is for Penny. The two are almost synonymous in South Africa, in which Penny Siopis has remained a Grande Dame of painting over a protracted length of time. P is also for Pink, her favourite colour for some time now, and the central colour of her current show, titled “Lasso”.

You have to hand it to Penny Siopis, she works at her painting. Unlike a lot of artists who have allowed their methods and approaches to painting to stagnate over the years, Siopis subjects her work to constant overhauling and refreshing, giving her current work a relevance unusual in painters who have been around for a while.

Instead of her large Modernist-era works which were thick with impasto daubing, this show also ventures into a more contemporary anti-heroic style of small experiments with water colour and milky glaze in which marks are allowed to spread and coagulate without orchestration by the author's hand. This is a style which strays interestingly into the area of mark-making as a form of fragile and intimate open-ended thought or question, rather than the epic history-painting she has been known for in the past.

Having said all this though, I really battled to find anything of interest on the show. Her best work consisted of the few occasions where her experiments had been allowed to obscure altogether the mark-making of her own hand. Because Siopis's mark-making is trite. Considering the length and status of her career, one would expect more of her. She has not made serious inroads into learning how to draw. One would expect that by now she should be able to approach the skill of someone like Terry Kurgan. But her drawing is fluffy and weak, and does not even interestingly accommodate her own fluffiness and weakness.

It's an outrageous cheek for an unknown nobody like me to fantasise about how I would teach famous and successful people to make better art. But nonetheless I can't help myself sometimes. To Penny I would say, see what you can do with a cloth with dipped in thinners.

Labels: Michael Stevenson, painting, penny siopis

While Robert Sloon was having his cash taken off him at the National Gallery, I was voluntarily giving mine away to the barman at the Kwa Mlamli shebeen in Gugs, which had been turned into a temporary gallery for the day. There was another group show by the 'Gugulective', which included video (good), painting (very good), interactive painting (got a bit sentimental), and performance, which was the main focus of the show.

Most of the performance was live and of the musical kind, and it was spirited and fun. But I'm afraid I have a strange neural dysfunction which makes me resistant to the charms of dub poetry, which there was quite a lot of too. I liked the performance by Unathi Sigenu who sat in the bar sending sms messages. Mine said “Arrest the art”, which I liked. Though he should probably have sent it to Robert Sloon instead.

This piece written by Lizza

Labels: Gugulective, Lizza, painting, performance, Unathi Sigenu, video art

This sent to me by our favourite weather correspondent Lizza Littlewort:

It's been interesting watching the tide of new ideas in drawing/painting turn from a trickle into a flood. By now it wouldn't be an exaggeration to call it a full-blown tsunami, bringing massive changes in the global art world.

About six years ago a painter, Luc Tuymans, became the most talked-about artist at the Venice Biennale. But the biennale organisation refused to give him a prize because they 'didn't want to be seen to be encouraging painting.' By the next biennale there was a pavilion dedicated to painting, and by the one after that the main pavilion was chock full of the world's contemporary painting heavies like Tuymans and Dumas. They even wheeled out Francis Bacon for the show. I'd been hearing for years that painting has taken over European art
schools practically to the exclusion of anything else. It's a hard thing to imagine what would come out of it. So many people painting all at once is bound to produce something of interest. From the vantage point of South Africa one can but try to join the dots.

It's been reaching South Africa in a range of different streams for several years now. On the 'serious' end of the spectrum are global conceptual artists like Moshekwa Langa (one of my personal favourites right now), and the 'afropolitan' artists shown as a group at Michael Stevenson on the 'Distant Relatives/Relative Distance' show. Plus Lisa Brice, who's always a good benchmark of what's current, and new cooler washier drippier paintings by Penny Siopis. Cheeky of me, but I can't help noticing that the 'serious' crew all have a decidedly Dumas look about them. Guess you have to choose your influences with care if you want to be perceived as deep.

And then there are the 'unserious' sources, which are generating a huge range of seriously interesting ideas. Los Angeles outsider/skater culture and Japanese trolls alone have generated a massive groundswell of ideas. There have been ranges of hooded beasts and mutant reindeer and undead ghouls going on for years, a lot of which has been too cutesy to really say anything, but some of which has taken a really thought-provoking turn. Then there have been New York painters like Karen Kilimnik and Dana Schutz, satirising in genius slacker style the insane extremes of American culture with their works on, among others, Paris Hilton (yay!) and Michael Jackson.

There's no single direction in any of this, and each of us has our own reaction to it, but for me the first time I really saw the tide turn in Cape Town was when I was stopped in my tracks by an Early Friday poster by Georgina Gratrix. I couldn't believe there was anyone who could draw like that at Michaelis, it was just unheard-of to me. I continued to be gobsmacked and delighted when I came across the work of her contemporaries, Becky Haysom and Andrej Nowicki (whose name I don't think I can spell properly, but I'm trying). I swear if I was religious, this would have counted as the moment for me when god met me on a rocky road, and promised to create a flood that would wash the memories of Debora Poynton and Tanya Poole out of my mind forever. I'm sorry if this offends anyone, but holy Jesus, there's only so much one can bear without starting to crack.

Of course if you were a conspiracy theorist, which of course I am, then you would believe that this whole climate change had been orchestrated by the shadowy Illuminati in the form of Charles Saatchi, who decided there should be a “Triumph of Painting” and set about putting it into place using vast bulwarks of cash, and dredging up the ghost of Martin Kippenberger to lend authenticity to his claims. As for me, if this is the effect of my world being constructed
by a big ad mogul in the sky, I'm happy to float along with the tide.

Labels: Lizza, painting