February 14th, 2010 Germaine Greer
The greatest artwork of the 20th century was 100 miles long and nearly 12ft high. A multitude of hands took 13 years to make it, out of house paint, vehicle paint, spray paint, any paint they could find. They had to work fast to evade the border police, for they were working three metres inside the perimeter of East Berlin. Defacing any part of the border installation was streng verboten.
The rough stone and cement blocks of earlier Berlin walls had offered little opportunity for anything but slogans, awkwardly lettered with a broad brush, and the odd wobbly sight joke. Border Wall 75, which began to replace them in 1976, was made of smoother cement panels that were, unwisely, painted white. Gradually, artists began to cover the western face with words and images, some vivid, some feeble, some accomplished. There were no rules, beyond the subtle discipline of graffiti everywhere. Good stuff would be respected, but weak stuff would be drawn and painted over, making a palimpsest of protest old and new.
In April 1984, two Frenchmen living in a squat not far from the wall began to paint on it on a larger scale. Thierry Noir painted over the existing graffiti, rapidly covering whole panels. When passers-by objected, he pretended not to understand. Christophe Bouchet preferred to use the earlier graffiti as bases for his own designs. The eventual aim was to produce a painting five kilometres long.
In 1989, the wall began to come down. At first, the mauerspechte (wall-peckers) chipped off small pieces, eventually making holes big enough to walk through. The East German government then took the wall down. There was no outcry. Berliners were only too glad to see the wall go. Most of it was smashed up to make road base, but the more striking panels were placed in storage. Small sections were deliberately left, at Potsdamer Platz, on Bernauer Strasse and on Mühlenstrasse. Artists from all over the world were invited to paint the eastern face of the fragments left standing, in a visual enactment of reunification, and so posterity was granted to the Wall Park and the East Side Gallery, a 1.3km section of wall.
Celebration does not fire the imagination or drive the arm the way protest does. In 1990, even Noir and Bouchet could only manage to parody their earlier work. Other artists used the opportunity to promote themselves, in profound contradiction to the spirit of the wall. The cement panels are now sagging and crumbling, and the paint is flaking off. The East Side Gallery has been restored, for the second time, at a cost of €2m – money well spent as it is now Berlin's leading visitor attraction. Many of the tourists are unaware that the slick images they have come to see were no part of the historic wall.
When artist Edwina Sandys arrived in Berlin in February 1990, she was told by the East German minister of culture that, if only she had come a few weeks earlier, she could have taken whatever she wanted and no questions would have been asked. As it was, government agents were preparing to sell panels off at $60,000 each (10 times what the last authenticated panel actually fetched when it was auctioned in 2008). Sandys, who is a granddaughter of Winston Churchill, was hoping to use sections of the wall as the basis of her own sculpture for the Churchill Memorial and Library at Westminster College Fulton, Missouri (where Churchill made his famous "iron curtain" speech). She was eventually allowed to choose eight from 400 "better pieces" of the wall for shipping to New York, where she had male and female silhouettes cut out of them by high-pressure water jets to make her own sculpture, Breakthrough, unveiled by Ronald Reagan in November 1990. The pieces also became part of a second sculpture called Breakfree, now at the Roosevelt Library in New York.
Sandys was probably the last or even the only person to persuade the East Germans to let her have bits of the wall for free. In June 1990, 81 segments from the Waldemarstrasse, including 33 painted by Thierry Noir and 12 by Kiddy Citny were put up for auction in Monaco, where they fetched €1.5m. Noir immediately sued for a share of the proceeds. Litigation dragged on until February 1995, when his claim was upheld.
Until recently, no concerted attempt was made to document the wall. There are few colour photographs beyond those taken by Noir to record his and Bouchet's activities. Now, German documentary film-maker Hartmut Jahn has traced fragments of the wall as far as the US, where they can be seen in a men's room in a Las Vegas casino, in a floating restaurant in Maine, in the Microsoft cafeteria in Redmond, Washington, at Fort Knox, at the Hard Rock Cafe in Orlando, in the headquarters of the CIA in Virginia, on Ronald Reagan's ranch – and to Poland, Italy, Spain, and Japan. Since mid-2009, Jahn has been mounting exhibitions of panoramic photographs called variously The New Owners of the Wall and The Berlin Wall – Sold Out. His photographs are the final proof that a stupendous human artefact has been lost forever.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Berlin Wall, Comment, Culture, The Guardian | Comments Off
February 5th, 2010 Jon Canter
If an artist's work is difficult, you might think those writing about it would want to make it more accessible. If only
On 14 March 1888, Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo about his latest canvas: "It is a drawbridge with a little cart going over it, outlined against a blue sky – the river blue as well, the banks orange coloured with green grass and a group of women washing linen in smocks and multicoloured caps."
Dear, oh dear. Little cart, blue sky, green grass, multicoloured caps: simplistic or what? When you go to The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters, currently on show at the Royal Academy, don't bother with His Letters. Vincent, a word in your unbandaged shell-like – this is the way you write about art. It comes from the online catalogue for Esther Shalev-Gerz's exhibition, opening next week at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. "Over three decades, Esther Shalev-Gerz has consistently performed a process of unravelling particularities." Now that's more like it. It certainly beats: "Over three decades, Esther Shalev-Gerz has consistently performed a process of painting a drawbridge with a little cart going over it."
I've never unravelled a particularity, or even ravelled one, which many consider the first stage in the particularity-unravelling process. But I have, for nearly 20 years, been married to a painter, so I appreciate the agony. Not the agony of painting but the far greater torture of writing about paintings, in order to attract people to see them. Art for art's sake? Forget it. What you need is artspeak for artspeak's sake. Let's return to that catalogue: "Shalev-Gerz mines the personal in order to address and interrogate the ways in which the present is understood. Drawing on the fictions of history and speculations on the future, she amplifies the ethics of being invited to speak and being invited to" – nearly over now, honest – "listen. Hers is a powerful artistic practice that complicates how we understand our place in the world."
There, at the end, is the message, loud and clear as an amplified ethic. Shalev-Gerz complicates. She's a complicator. Thank goodness for that. Complication is what artspeak is all about. It seeks to confer status and worth on an artist's work by insisting on its obscurity, which it conveys through a grey porridge of abstract nouns. The purpose of those unravelled particularities? "To reflect on the ways in which the generalities of history and memory are constructed." The overall effect? "This gathering of works interrogates assumptions and opens the space between understanding and perception." (That's it. No more extracts, I promise.) You might think that if an artist's work is difficult, those who write about it might want to make it more comprehensible. You might be wrong.
Artists, in my experience, are practical. They're earthy. They worry about money. They have interesting stains. Grayson Perry never fashions a sentence so obscure it shuts the space between understanding and perception and knocks them both on the head. Then again, none of the above artspeak was written by the artist herself. It's the work of a contributor to her catalogue. For all I know, Shalev-Gerz is an unpretentious woman who likes a laugh and always buys her round. As for her work, I'll never know. The artspeak has had precisely the opposite effect from the one intended – it's convinced me not to see it.
As a 16-year-old, I once read my poetry in a Hampstead pub called The Freemasons Arms. As I stepped onstage, I had an overwhelming urge. I was desperate to baffle the audience. I ached for them to be baffled by my poems and attribute their bafflement to the fact that my poetry was "deep". In the event, they giggled and that was the end of my poetry career. But at least I understand the adolescent impulse behind artspeak. I just don't understand why it's written by grown-ups.
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February 1st, 2010 Germaine Greer
The boast of the Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge that it houses "collections of international importance, including work of European, American and Asian schools, ranging from the 13th century to the present day" is no more than the truth. Its Constables, Titians, Monets, Poussins are as good as the best in any museum anywhere in the world. I can still remember seeing for the first time there a landscape by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, whom I knew only as a painter of bloated, sentimental female figures. Le Grand Vent depicts nothing more remarkable than a piece of grassy wasteground, but Renoir's swift, allusive brushstrokes convey the density and texture of every hummock, as well as the glittering energy of the passing gust of wind.
I was astonished that Renoir had used black to render the boisterousness of the white clouds. If he could so capture a landscape and a moment, why did he ever do anything else? After more than 40 years I still can't get over that picture. The unique character of the Fitzwilliam means you can quickly compare Renoir's handling of the sky with Constable's, and come just that bit closer to understanding what all truly great paintings have in common.
The museum has just hung a show of paintings by John Singer Sargent, Walter Sickert and Stanley Spencer from its collection, and I find myself wishing they hadn't. For the first time, the museum seems to me provincial rather than perfect. Many of the works are unapologetically minor; but even the ones that are not are less significant than they should be, if they are to dwell on the same plane as the rest of the collection. Sargent was grotesquely successful in his own time, as portrait painters tend to be once they have established a popular formula – but he is not a painter we need to see much of now. He may have fancied himself as a great landscape painter seduced from his true bent by filthy lucre. If he did, the examples shown here prove he was wrong.
When you look at a reclining nude painted by Titian – the Fitzwilliam's Venus and Cupid with a Lute-Player, say – you are being admitted to a realm beyond carnality. The luminous figure is alive but poised and contained, not simply dumped amid dirty linen. Titian's model, if there was one, was probably a courtesan, probably under age, and no better than she should be, but all such concerns are irrelevant.
Sickert's nudes are very different. The exhibition catalogue asks whether the figure in Mornington Crescent Nude 1907 is model, prostitute or corpse. She might well be all three. Her body appears saponified, her breasts and belly engorged as if with the gases of decomposition. We look down on her from a cool distance, as if we were undertakers come to remove her to the morgue. A succession of four Sickert exhibitions in London should have been enough to convince us that Sickert is simply not good enough for the Fitzwilliam.
Alhough painted nearly 30 years later, and very different in execution, Stanley Spencer's self-portrait with his second wife Patricia Preece could be a companion piece to the Mornington Crescent Nude. Preece's flesh has undergone slippage, and her face is set in a staring death mask; only the painter is alive. By the time these pictures were painted, Preece had returned to her lover, the painter Dorothy Hepworth, whose pictures she used to sign; she was then in the process of stripping Spencer of everything he owned.
By way of justifying the yoking together of these three artists, rather too much is made of the slender connections between them – which boils down to little more than that they occasionally treated similar themes. Sargent had no more acrimonious critic than Sickert, and Spencer learned nothing from either of them.
Of the women who were Sickert's faithful allies, only Thérèse Lessore makes the grade. The portrait of Sickert in coloured chalks and watercolour that Lessore made in 1919, eight years before she became the painter's third wife, is included as a curiosity. Sylvia Gosse was the most important of the dozen or so women who worked on Sickert's prints, copying on to his canvases the details of the photographs he used later in his career. Gosse also lent him money, bought his pictures, nursed his first wife in her terminal illness and raised a fund for him in old age. The Fitzwilliam was left a still life by Gosse in 1991 (the museum has 13 of her prints, but she was allowed no space in this exhibition).
It takes a sharp eye to detect Spencer's faithful wife Hilda Carline as the diminutive grey statue in his repulsive pseudo-allegory, Love on the Moor, completed after her death. Carline was a serious artist, who worked as steadily as she could, alongside raising two daughters, the misery and turmoil of being married to Spencer, a mental breakdown and failed treatment for breast cancer. The Fitzwilliam exhibition offers a pretty good object lesson in how women's contribution is winnowed out of art history.
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