An Ode to The Art Of Yore

Thu, 4 Mar 2010 21:30:24 +0200

Art is Dead! Long live Design!
And what do I mean by that?
Firstly what I consider to be ‘art’ is a piece you see and are drawn to. It makes you question things, it engages you to your core, it provokes. All of this from a profoundly visceral level. The art that died is that which aims to replicate the same emotions linguistically and through semantics and metaphor.

I went to the Louvre last year and was blown away. I was blown away by how much dedication an artist had to his craft. By how the artists strove to realise his vision as it was so strong within himself that it was no longer containable. It was so strong that it bursts forth from him and the art piece was held in place for all to see by that sheer force. Nowadays the work is held together by a myriad curators, a few hundred publicists, a thousand bloggers and a millions pounds of tack! Gone are the Michaelangelos of our time.

Art is Over! Over-analysed, Over-explained, Over-commercialised. It is said we see the world the way we are; and that metaphorical space in which you are free to be and think whatever you want with no judgements about what may be right or wrong is what makes us love art. For it makes us also love ourselves. That feeling is being relegated to the back. The future of art is in the hands of the over-articulated and the over-paid.

Now I’m not relagating all art to the morgue, just that which lacks sincerity. Art that is more ‘tell me’ as opposed to ‘show me’. I mean everyone and their grandmother is now an artist, and it all just seems so pretensious. Gallery are saturated with the most ridiculous pieces masquerading as art. Which is only to be imagined. As the number of galleries have gone on the rise, the number of pieces made to fill these galleries arise. But much like the increse in tabloid magazines only sought to cheapen the ‘cult of celebrity’, so as the increase in galleries cheapened the art market.

Design though is the new Art! Art that is tangible, physical; art that can be held and utilised; art that can be embraced and loved. Art that grows with the user, as opposed to just hung on the all where it completely loses meaning incremental to the dust it collects over the years. Art that invades a story, and reflects stories gone. Yes, some designers just don’t cut it but to everyone of those designers there are a million artists. Art used to be bold, striking, shocking, awe-inspiring, but that job has been left to the designers now. And design has really taken off in the last decade.

With the onset of technology the downturn of art began. Technology has imbued in us, the mass, a feeling of urgency. We want things and we want them now! This feeling, the sense of urgency is in antithesis to art. Especially an artist of this ‘Art as Commodity’ era. Just like most of us, an artist tries to make a living. That means making enough money to eat. And to do so they must sell their products. So where time is money, the production of said art needs to be sped up to make said money.

Technology though favours a designer. Those designers who can really couple creativity with technology are doing fantastically well. Marcel Wanders is a big favourite of mine. Not least his work, but also his philosophy. He imbues his work profoundly with poetry, which unravels itself the more you explore. He creates so that you take an emotional journey with the piece wherein you do not want to let it go. You are happy with your piece, you form a bond with it. And if the piece happens to serve the practical purpose, you have no need for more consumption. You are satiated.

Nowadays we as consumers want for nothing. It is easy to go out and purchase a new item everyday as clothes and products can be bought for cheap. But what we crave really, underneath it all, as those masses of unwanted goods thrown out everyday testify, is a relationship with our objects. An experience, so to speak. And Art no longer gives that. Not all, just most of the new ones.

This is not meant to be a critical piece. It is just an ode to the art of yore.

Anish Kapoor @ The Royal Academy

Mon, 7 Dec 2009 22:12:44 +0200

The word on the street is that Anish Kapoor’s exhibition at The Royal Academy is the exhibition to see this year. So being the curious cat that I set out of the house early. I am wise enough to know that in London, whenever there is hype, you would be wise to set off early. So armed with my camera, a notepad and bravado, I took myself down to Piccadilly Circus. I arrived and had to negotiate myself past the flurry of early rising, Christmas shoppers, down past The Trocadero, past the Japan Centre heaving with people looking to purchase for lunch the cheapest and best quality sushi you are ever going to find in London, and promptly arrived at The RA only to be met with a long queue! It wasn’t a problem though as we were greeted with a huge Kapoor sculpture that provided plenty of entertainment for the waiting audience who saw themselves reflected in the mirrored balls over and over and over again.

Below are my notes from the show:
1. As well as being told that under no circumstances must you touch Kapoor’s work, upon entering the venue you were also instructed not to take pictures due to copyright reasons. I enjoyed breaking those rules because quite frankly I think the reasons given verge on the absurd. Personally I do not know Anish Kapoor yet, but I would hazard a guess that he might agree with me. Who on earth could copy Anish Kapoor, and how on earth, would they get away with it?

1. Upon entering the exhibition space, you were met with Kapoor’s Hive. The sculpture took up all the space in the room in all its glorious rust.

1. The work has a very playful quality. It invites you in and seeks to be interracted with. You were invited to go around, under and through his larger pieces. Around the Slug, under the Hive, and through the Non Object (Door) to get to the next room. Or you had to get very close to some of the larger sculptures to get somewhere else.

1. Despite the door-shaped ‘train’ of wax that is Svayambh taking an hour to get from one side of the gallery to the other, the audience were engaged. Which is testament to Kapoor’s work. His work frequently engages the viewer long and engages them in entirety as questions, thoughts and various other ponderings run through their mind’s eye. Whenever I view Anish Kapoor’s work, I frequently find myself asking a lot of questions about myself, the world around, a myriad other questions but I never question his art. And for me that is a rare quality.

1. Upon encountering Yellow, I literally wanted to take a running jump into its centre. Into an abyss that you would feel safe upon entering because of the feeling evoked by the piece. The feeling being pleasure. Not joy but pleasure. Pleasure is a contained direct expression of happiness, whereas joy is wild. Yellow, in all its largesse, is a container turned sideways.

1. When I Am Pregnant is the reverse of Yellow, metaphorically in terms of colour and literally in terms of shape. Where Yellow was concave, When I Am... is convex. though I still had the impression that something pleasant would burst out of its swell.

1. My least favoured pieces were the smaller pieces. As If To Celebrate I Discovered...., 1000 Names 1982 & 1980 and 1000 Names Berlin. A big reason I am not as impacted by them is largely to do with the scale. I like Anish Kapoor BIG. I love the use of colour and coloured pigments and I appreciated the rawness of their application and the fact that they were not overly finished. He let them be. Its just that the shapes were lost on me.

1. The concrete mounds of Greyman Cries, Shaman Dies, Billowing Smoke, Beauty Evoked are pieces you will either like or dislike. I am a big fan of concrete as a material and as an art medium and Anish Kapoor managed to render concrete with warmth and tactileness; a quality that might seem oxymorous to the material, but is obviously applicable to concrete when utilised correctly.

1. Shooting In The Corner was a very interesting piece. You enter a room and are confronted with {the above}. At first you see a room filled with the familiar known red wax of Kapoor’s work. Then you wait. You wait and wait and after 10 minutes, I started to feel anxious about what was going to happen. The red wax began to take on a different meaning due to the experience of waiting. It became a symbol of the anxiety I was feeling. I’m not too sure if the wait was for that intention or if it was in order to get the crowd in. Suddenly a young man comes from nowhere and put a large container of wax in the canon and after a moment he fires. It is somewhat of an anti-climax. Though visually the piece is very strong.

1. The one criticism of the exhibition would be the venue. The Royal Academy to me is a venue that generally has an ambience of stiffness. The large pieces took up all the space in the rooms and the smaller pieces tended to get swamped. Were I to have curated the exhibition I would have placed them in a venue such as the Barbican. A venue with just the right combination of dynamism and stillness, where there are large rooms (for the larger pieces of work) and smaller rooms (for the smaller pieces). And with those works that could be safely (for the artist and the audience) engaged with, I would encourage the viewer to play.

1. I feel very connected to Anish Kapoor as an artist with regards to his approach to his work, the way in which he conceives of his ideas and the way in which the ideas are executed. What I appreciate the most is the fact that his work doesn’t rely on polemic and what you see is what you get. The exhibition was great and I highly recommend it.

Everybody Frieze!

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:38:05 +0300

At the moment I work in a fancy pizza restaurant that has me on my feet at least 8 hours a day. When I first started there 2 weeks ago, I remember getting home and having to plunge my throbbing feet deep into a pail of ice; and this after a day when things weren’t really going my way. The customers coming in thick and fast, curious about the new venue, would sent me into a mild panic as I struggled to communicate with my fellow colleagues, manage the booking system, the coats and the phone all at the same time. After the first week, I had serious doubts as to whether this was the job was for me, but I persisted through the pain. Though as time went by, I noticed that the less my feet ached, the better I was at my job.

Alas, at Frieze, the more my feet ached, the worse the art seemed to get with no clear signs that it was going to get better. This was my first Frieze Art Fair and I was going to enjoy it. Everywhere you looked there was art. Inside there were rows and rows of art galleries that were under an extremely large marquee, that was now taking pride of place on Regents park. And outside, there was a Sculpture park full of large pieces, some harnessed to trees, othes anchored into the ground. Within the rows and rows of galleries, there were tons and tons of art pieces everywhere. The move into ‘Art as Commodity’ has quickly cheapened art. The contemporary pieces, were contemporary in the true sense of the word. The placard, most of which read that the pieces had been created this year, should have, in my opinion read that the pieces were created in the last week. Most of the pieces were badly produced and rendered in inferior quality material, and the most mundane things were considered to be pieces of art. I believe I saw a pair of socks on display in one gallery.

It was really difficult for me to find a piece of art that touched my soul. Yes, you could tell that an effort was made to tug on the heartstrings, engage the emotions and cause you to stop, but did it work? No. The usual cliches were employed and it was glaringly obvious that most of the work had been made with little love, and with as little effort as possible. It was, as it were, a microcosm of the world in which we inhabit today. Things were bigger, louder, shinier, more confrontational, more ouvert, and less sincere. It seemed as if people were trying to get their ‘goods’ out there as quickly as possible so they could make the market. I did take into consideration that my cynicism wasn’t a question of the art that beheld me, but a question of my own jadedness. Though 5 minutes and 200 works later, I knew that wasn’t the case.

It wasn’t all horrible. There were some bits that I liked. I liked the style of writing the names of the artists directly on the wall. I liked a lot of the curation, particularly the juxtapositioning of the old art (Picasso, err... Gibert & George?) with the new. Where the words had become the pieces, there were some cases in which this worked.
I understand that art arranged in a space like Frieze was more for those who wanted to consume art in mall-like environment, and for those looking to buy. Whereas for those of us who choose quality over quantity, I would recommend continuing to consume art in the smaller environment of a gallery. Because if you are anything like me, the experienece at Frieze could leave you very disillsioned.

The Sea * Unfinished*

Thu, 1 Oct 2009 17:15:03 +0300

This morning I woke up and wished I was the Sea.
Whoosh! And I became.
Bottomless. Deeper than a note from the most poetic of hearts.
Azure. Bluer than those who’ve lost first loves.
Ferocious. Protector of the myriad of colours that lay beneath.
And at once still. Leading those on journeys to shores not yet discovered.

Then I wished I was the mountain.
Boom! And I became.
Soaring. Towering high amidst the clouds, swooping low amongst the sea’s beds.
Undefined. Snowy peaks, grassy tops, hollow caves, deep ravines.
Mystifying. An enigma for the secure, a terrain to conquer for the bold.
A majestic defender for the weak.

And then I wished I was the wind.
Swoosh! And I became.
Wild. Free, unburdened, abandoned, divine and indivisible.
Prominent. A casual sigh, a gentle breeze, a tempestuous storm,
Nourishing. Seeking to inspire those quiescent surfaces above, beyond and below.

At night, I lay my head down and wished that I were me.
And I became.