February 11th, 2010 Jonathan Jones
With their giant canvases and towering ambition, Gorky and Rothko transcended everything we thought possible of art today
The abstract expressionists, those Amercian artists who made their country's art famous 60 years ago, cannot be ignored. They are so real and so massive; so absolute.
They've rolled back over me recently. Walking into Tate Liverpool a couple of weeks ago, I found that Mark Rothko had got to the Albert Dock before me. His Seagram Murals currently hang in a warehouse space on the ground floor of the museum, and I found them devastatingly beautiful. Their wine-dark ecstasy pays such Bacchic homage to the House of Mysteries in Pompeii, whose paintings he saw while planning them. Just recently, I saw Roman wall paintings in the archaeological museum in Naples that bleed with Rothko reds.
Rothko is a great artist, and so is Arshile Gorky, whose retrospective has just opened at Tate Modern. I'll be reviewing that shortly, so I will just comment more generally on how Gorky and Rothko transcended almost everything we now expect art to be. They aspired to greatness – a quality almost no art nowadays believes it can attain. Some people call them pompous for that; I call them courageous.
It's worth looking, in the first few rooms of the Gorky show, at how he tried on different habits of excellence: painting like Picasso, then like Cézanne. The desperation to achieve on their level is both moving and disconcerting. But finally he, like Rothko, found a personal, original road to the highest mountains.
When I encountered the abstract expressionists en masse for the first time in New York's Museum of Modern Art in the 1990s, they taught me that art in our time can be not merely interesting or shocking – let alone "fun" – but can attain the most profound qualities of the noblest masters. And here in the UK, they've taught me that all over again.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Blogposts, Culture, Exhibitions, guardian.co.uk, Mark Rothko, Painting, Tate Liverpool, Tate Modern | Comments Off
February 8th, 2010 Laura Cumming
Tate Liverpool
There is a work of such coruscating brilliance in this show that it overshadows most of the rest. No wonder it is saved until last. In a darkened gallery, preceded by a warning against explicit sexual content, what appears to be a silent movie unfolds to a score of speakeasy blues except that instead of actors there are shadow puppets performing in mordant black and white.
The film opens with a ship riding stormy waters from which bound slaves are being thrown. They drift to a desert island that turns into a gigantic head, swallowing and disgorging them in the American south. There, a male slave is forced – or is he? – into sexual union with a white man, the resulting baby tossed into the cotton fields by a midwife, where it grows into a sunflower and eventually a lynching tree. In between are many tragicomic scenes, each as complex as a Goya etching. Horror and sorrow are held in equal tension, violence intercut with tenderness throughout.
8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E Walker (2005) is controversial in America. Walker has been condemned for exploiting racial stereotypes, pandering to the white art world, even for marrying a white man. It is easy to see why her versions of history might offend because they are never clear-cut. Her marvellous graphic precision is used instead to spear the mind with images of the world turned upside down and inside out; her narratives have more in common with Flannery O'Connor than Uncle Tom's Cabin.
So Walker is definitely in the right room of this show, the one devoted to subversive originality. Though the curators have called it "From Post-Modern to Post-Black: Appropriation, Black Humour and Double Negatives" instead. From which you may deduce all you need to know about their unremitting academicism and dead-handed approach to art.
The subject of this chaotic, badly displayed but undeniably fascinating show is, in any case, ideas more than art, namely those of the eminent intellectual Paul Gilroy in his 1993 book The Black Atlantic. Or at least the central idea of the Atlantic as a kind of continent in negative, a place where cultures perpetually crisscross so that there is no dominant national tradition either in Europe or America; that black culture only means something to black people being as insidious an idea as that of European culture only having meaning for whites.
This is where modernist art comes in on cue: it's what cubism famously draws from African sculpture and, conversely, what African-Americans get from cubism. It's the surrealists with their ethnographic photos; it's Josephine Baker and art deco; it's the Guyanese-born Frank Bowling reprising Barnett Newman in the colours of the Rastafarian flag.
It is also, alas, paintings such as Edward Burra's Harlem and Palmer Hayden's Midsummer Night in Harlem, hung next to each other to show a painful convergence: the white Englishman and the black American producing equally awful variations on "primitivist" art.
Bowling excepted, this only takes the show as far as the 1930s. Thereafter, as it seems to me, Gilroy's ideas are harder to illustrate through art than music or writing. There are obvious two-ways: Lorna Simpson's Photo Booth of African-Americans which gets its commemorative aesthetic from Christian Boltanski; Glenn Ligon's stencilling of one of Richard Pryor's deadly race gags in the manner of a Richard Prince joke painting (with an overlay of Warhol gold). Would Prince ever dare?
But the theme peters out as the show goes in too many different directions at once. Naturally, it must include protest art (though there are noticeably few highpoints here other than David Hammons's 1969 Admissions Office, a glass door with a black face and hands pressed desperately against it like the traces of a scorched man).
And the curators don't want to leave out body art, gender art, identity art and so on, which introduces a whole slew of polemical work, some of which has no obvious place in this show. Why is the Cuban Ana Mendieta extensively represented when her ritualised performances with blood, earth and water surely speak exclusively to feminism when much more relevant artists such as African-Americans Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Kalup Linzy or Martin Puryear are not here at all?
In the opening galleries, Afro Modern presents art in the culture of jazz, blues, du Bois and Baldwin. But this approach, so conducive to Gilroy's ideas, pretty soon fades away to expose the dry box-ticking of this show. There is no more point in showing Chris Ofili's Double Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars (1997) without referring to its obvious soundtrack in rap, for instance, than in propping it next to a Pan-African version of the stars and stripes in red, black and green. Displayed like this, they are just one variety of black art after another.
No show that includes works by Jacob Lawrence or the inspired collagist Romare Bearden can truly lack power. If you have never seen Bearden's strange and compelling images, made of scraps of high and low art, old masters and ads, African masks and cartoons, then Afro Modern is ultimately worth the visit. Bearden orchestrates his fragments like a street scene through which the eye moves, taking it all in on the go. His vision of country folk by a railroad watching for a train to come – and then go – is bleakly beautiful: catching the spectacle of life even as it departs.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Exhibitions, Features, Reviews, Tate Liverpool, The Observer | Comments Off
February 7th, 2010 Laura Cumming
Tate Liverpool
There is a work of such coruscating brilliance in this show that it overshadows most of the rest. No wonder it is saved until last. In a darkened gallery, preceded by a warning against explicit sexual content, what appears to be a silent movie unfolds to a score of speakeasy blues except that instead of actors there are shadow puppets performing in mordant black and white.
The film opens with a ship riding stormy waters from which bound slaves are being thrown. They drift to a desert island that turns into a gigantic head, swallowing and disgorging them in the American south. There, a male slave is forced – or is he? – into sexual union with a white man, the resulting baby tossed into the cotton fields by a midwife, where it grows into a sunflower and eventually a lynching tree. In between are many tragicomic scenes, each as complex as a Goya etching. Horror and sorrow are held in equal tension, violence intercut with tenderness throughout.
8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E Walker (2005) is controversial in America. Walker has been condemned for exploiting racial stereotypes, pandering to the white art world, even for marrying a white man. It is easy to see why her versions of history might offend because they are never clear-cut. Her marvellous graphic precision is used instead to spear the mind with images of the world turned upside down and inside out; her narratives have more in common with Flannery O'Connor than Uncle Tom's Cabin.
So Walker is definitely in the right room of this show, the one devoted to subversive originality. Though the curators have called it "From Post-Modern to Post-Black: Appropriation, Black Humour and Double Negatives" instead. From which you may deduce all you need to know about their unremitting academicism and dead-handed approach to art.
The subject of this chaotic, badly displayed but undeniably fascinating show is, in any case, ideas more than art, namely those of the eminent intellectual Paul Gilroy in his 1993 book The Black Atlantic. Or at least the central idea of the Atlantic as a kind of continent in negative, a place where cultures perpetually crisscross so that there is no dominant national tradition either in Europe or America; that black culture only means something to black people being as insidious an idea as that of European culture only having meaning for whites.
This is where modernist art comes in on cue: it's what cubism famously draws from African sculpture and, conversely, what African-Americans get from cubism. It's the surrealists with their ethnographic photos; it's Josephine Baker and art deco; it's the Guyanese-born Frank Bowling reprising Barnett Newman in the colours of the Rastafarian flag.
It is also, alas, paintings such as Edward Burra's Harlem and Palmer Hayden's Midsummer Night in Harlem, hung next to each other to show a painful convergence: the white Englishman and the black American producing equally awful variations on "primitivist" art.
Bowling excepted, this only takes the show as far as the 1930s. Thereafter, as it seems to me, Gilroy's ideas are harder to illustrate through art than music or writing. There are obvious two-ways: Lorna Simpson's Photo Booth of African-Americans which gets its commemorative aesthetic from Christian Boltanski; Glenn Ligon's stencilling of one of Richard Pryor's deadly race gags in the manner of a Richard Prince joke painting (with an overlay of Warhol gold). Would Prince ever dare?
But the theme peters out as the show goes in too many different directions at once. Naturally, it must include protest art (though there are noticeably few highpoints here other than David Hammons's 1969 Admissions Office, a glass door with a black face and hands pressed desperately against it like the traces of a scorched man).
And the curators don't want to leave out body art, gender art, identity art and so on, which introduces a whole slew of polemical work, some of which has no obvious place in this show. Why is the Cuban Ana Mendieta extensively represented when her ritualised performances with blood, earth and water surely speak exclusively to feminism when much more relevant artists such as African-Americans Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Kalup Linzy or Martin Puryear are not here at all?
In the opening galleries, Afro Modern presents art in the culture of jazz, blues, du Bois and Baldwin. But this approach, so conducive to Gilroy's ideas, pretty soon fades away to expose the dry box-ticking of this show. There is no more point in showing Chris Ofili's Double Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars (1997) without referring to its obvious soundtrack in rap, for instance, than in propping it next to a Pan-African version of the stars and stripes in red, black and green. Displayed like this, they are just one variety of black art after another.
No show that includes works by Jacob Lawrence or the inspired collagist Romare Bearden can truly lack power. If you have never seen Bearden's strange and compelling images, made of scraps of high and low art, old masters and ads, African masks and cartoons, then Afro Modern is ultimately worth the visit. Bearden orchestrates his fragments like a street scene through which the eye moves, taking it all in on the go. His vision of country folk by a railroad watching for a train to come – and then go – is bleakly beautiful: catching the spectacle of life even as it departs.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Exhibitions, Features, Reviews, Tate Liverpool, The Observer | Comments Off
February 1st, 2010 Jonathan Jones
This journey through the culture of the Black Atlantic – from Primitivist modernism through to postmodern video work – is full of startling insights, even if it eventually loses its way
Jacob Lawrence's Street to Mbari, a picture in pencil, tempera and gouache of a crowded market in Nigeria in 1964, is the kind of work that curators put into a group exhibition at their peril. It is so good, so convincing, that it almost blinds you to the merits of every other artist in Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, which opens today at Tate Liverpool. And yet Street to Mbari – a portrait of Africa by a great African American artist – is also an argument in favour of this exhibition, and a way to penetrate its complex ideas.
Tate Liverpool seems an apposite place to explore the bleaker aspects of the Atlantic. The museum is contained within the forbidding 19th-century warehouses of the Albert Dock, which speaks more lucidly than any other British setting of the history of the slave trade, documented in detail at the International Slavery Museum nearby.
But Afro Modern is more complex than that. It is inspired by a book, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, first published in 1993 by the British cultural critic Paul Gilroy. Gilroy's thesis, reacting against essentialist Afrocentrism, is that black culture's response to the modern world, into which Africans were transported so violently, has been ambivalent. As I understand it – and it is a difficult book – Gilroy believes that although African migration in the 18th century was brutally enforced, the development of black consciousness in the Americas and Britain was never just a rejection of "white" culture, but an engagement with it. Black culture, in other words, has crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic – at first in chains, but then willfully and creatively.
Those journeys are well captured by the work of Jacob Lawrence, who was born in Atlantic City in 1917 and in the aftermath of the Great Depression, created the most important American history painting cycle of the 20th century, The Migration Series. It portrays the journeys of black people from the oppressive south to the northern industrial cities in search of work and freedom. Lawrence's Street to Mbari is the exhilarated, ecstatic, yet composed and detailed record of an outsider's response to Africa. In Lawrence's eyes, Africa is the new world. It is a painting that travels; not a document of "homecoming", but as a record of complex perspectives, of what was gained as well as lost.
The show is more subversive than it first appears. Yes, there are nods to the Harlem Renaissance – notably poems by Langston Hughes illustrated by Aaron Douglas – and documents from the civil rights era, including a telling work by David Hammons in which black faces and hands press desperately at the glass panel of the door to a university admissions office. But here too are works by white artists who were entranced by "the primitive". Picasso's 1909 Bust of a Woman comes from the same period as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and shares its deliberately jarring, shocking transformation of a face into a carved wooden African mask.
Man Ray's photograph Noir et Blanche (1926) portrays the famous Parisian avant garde muse Kiki of Montmartre resting her pearl-complexioned face next to a mask from Africa. The picture finds a similarity in the almond shapes of their faces that, too, echoes Les Demoiselles. These images take us to the very heart of the fascination with African art that so inspired European modernists a century ago.
These are artists whose views on race would probably seem highly offensive to us. And not so long ago, an exhibition such as this would have felt obliged to point this out, to provide long wall texts explaining that modern art's "primitivism" was the racist culture of an age of empire. But this exhibition is far more ambivalent: it documents the jazz age dances of Josephine Baker as comic, self-conscious, dramatisations of the kind of fantasy Picasso indulges in Les Demoiselles, with watercolours and magazine photographs that reveal how she became an icon for Parisian artists. It sets a painting of Harlem by the strange British painter Edward Burra alongside jazzy works by the Harlem Renaissance painter Aaron Douglas – the pure shapes of Douglas's murals contrasting with Burra's meaty caricatures.
Near Lawrence's street scene is Constantin Brancusi's abstract sculpture The Blonde Negress (1926): a shining metallic vision of a futurist head that resembles a cross between yet another African mask and a design for a beautiful robot. Brancusi's eroticised, idolised visions of an abstract human form indicate how modernists drew on Africa to invent a utopian model for a new humanity. Elsewhere, a film by the surrealist Maya Deren records Voodoo rituals in 1940s Haiti – the very appearance of which reminds us that no history of the Black Atlantic world can just be aesthetic or art-historical.
One of the best things about Gilroy's book was the way in which it broke up the distinctions between high art and popular culture, and between history and the new, that limit conventional views of modernism. The Black Atlantic discusses JMW Turner's 1840 painting of a slave ship and tells how its bloody sky and sea scattered with flailing African bodies so upset its first owner, John Ruskin, that he sold it. Yet it also discusses how Quincy Jones was influenced by a stay in Sweden in what Gilroy sees as his pivotal role in the reinvention of jazz. Gilroy sees such music as one of the fundamental black contributions to a "counter-culture of modernity".
In the early galleries of Afro Modern, the curators follow this principle, mixing jazz culture and art together – Langston Hughes's poems are modelled on blues lyrics and eerily evoke Robert Johnson, but read with enormous weight and clarity on the page. Yet in the later rooms of the show, recent art is treated in isolation from that kind of larger cultural history. The least impressive room is the 1960s display, whose protest art seems narrow in comparison with the possibilities of 1920s modernism: you simply don't get the same sense of creative dialogue between black and white artists, although Frank Bowling's painting Who's Afraid of Barney Newman?, which reinvents Newman's abstract vertical bands in tropical colours and places on them a spectral map of South America, is a highly honourable exception. The last room presents Chris Ofili's painting Captain Shit, with its psychedelic black superhero, whose powerful features suggest Japanese comics. But offering the work in isolation from 1990s hip-hop, whose aesthetic it so clearly shares, is surely a bit po-faced.
In fact, the entire argument about the Black Atlantic seems to dissipate as the show goes on. Only fleetingly does its big themes surface in the contemporary work on display. In Ellen Gallagher's spooky painting Bird in Hand (2006), for instance, which resembles a design for a crazed countercultural remake of Pirates of the Carribean. And there is a hypnotically horrible film by American artist Kara Walker, Eight Possible Beginnings; or the Creation of African-America, in which the history of the US is told by puppets in black-and-white silhouette. They begin in folksy, sickly-sweet nostalgia, but rapidly degenerate into scenes of rape and abuse. I can't count the number of times I have encountered films by Walker in group shows; each time they grow to consume surrounding works. Here is an artist whose sense of history seems to be choking her, and threatens to swallow us.
Outside, rain lashes the pool at the heart of the Albert Dock, out towards the Mersey and the Atlantic beyond. This exhibition is a brave, intelligent – and at its best – transformative encounter with that melancholy ocean and its voyagers.
Rating: 4/5
Posted in Art, Art and design, Chris Ofili, Culture, Exhibitions, guardian.co.uk, Jazz, Music, Reviews, Tate Liverpool | Comments Off