January 26th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
Journalist, painter and tireless champion of the arts in Scotland
Cordelia Oliver, who has died aged 86, was an indefatigable promoter of the arts in Scotland. In 1963, when her cultural commando friend Richard Demarco and Jim Haynes were making waves in Edinburgh with the Traverse theatre, Cordelia was offered a roving commission as the Guardian's arts correspondent in Scotland. For more than three decades she reported, often through pessimistic political times, the surge of optimism she felt in Scottish theatre, opera, music, painting and sculpture.
I first met her in the run-up to the Charles Rennie Mackintosh centenary exhibition at the Edinburgh festival in 1968. Cordelia, a most loyal Glaswegian, would have preferred the celebrations to be in the city of his birth. Unlike many in Glasgow at this time, she shared the considered judgment of German and Austrian architects who acclaimed the "Mackintoshismus" style. She had spent the war years at the Glasgow School of Art, not only as a student of painting by day, but as a volunteer firefighter by night. "If we painted in large letters: 'Glasgow School of Art built by Charles Rennie Mackintosh' on the roof," Cordelia remembered William Hutchison, the school's wry director, telling their nightwatch before dawn, "no self-respecting Luftwaffe pilot would ever think of bombing us."
Cordelia Patrick was born in Glasgow, the daughter of a merchant navy officer from the Mull of Kintyre. She attended the city's Hutchesons' grammar school, where she won the art and English prizes. At Glasgow School of Art, she won the Guthrie portrait prize and continued, after graduation, to teach evening classes there, along with her day job teaching art at Craigholme school for girls. As a prize-winning soloist she sang with Glasgow's Orpheus Choir. When that disbanded, she joined the Phoenix Choir, and sang at the first Edinburgh festival in 1947.
By the next year, Cordelia had married the writer and photographer George Oliver and left for London. But in 1950, when George became the art editor of a travel magazine, they moved to Edinburgh. As George's job gave him backstage access to Edinburgh festival productions, it allowed Cordelia to catch performers on the fly, in line drawings, many of which peppered her then anonymous reviews for the Glasgow Herald.
With George, a keen vintage car driver, Cordelia travelled extensively throughout Europe. In 1971 their destination was Bucharest, so she could write the catalogue for Demarco's Romanian art exhibition and encourage the artist Paul Neagu to emigrate to Scotland. Before long, Cordelia was presenting Neagu's television performance piece Going Tornado, in Aberdeen. Her ecstatic preview of the theatre-maker Tadeusz Kantor's The Water Hen, staged by Demarco in an abandoned poorhouse, helped launch it as the hit of the 1973 Edinburgh festival.
When Demarco invited Joseph Beuys and other Düsseldorf artists to stage their Strategy Get Arts exhibition, with its catchy palindromic title, at the Edinburgh College of Art, all hell was let loose among the Scottish arts establishment and there were tirades in the press. Now, 40 years later, George's photographs and Cordelia's perceptive reporting capture the excitement of this landmark event. Collaborating with Beuys on his later Edinburgh installations, George Wyllie was inspired to create his massive Straw Locomotive for the 1988 Glasgow Garden festival. When the flames of its Viking funeral died down, the silhouette of a giant question mark hovered in its burnt-out carcass. "Why," asked Cordelia, "has the National Gallery of Scotland never collected Wyllie's work?"
From 1970 onwards, Cordelia championed the creative troika of Giles Havergal, Philip Prowse and Robert David MacDonald who together, at a rejuvenated Citizens theatre, forged a drama unique in Britain, opening the whole spectrum of European theatre to Glasgow audiences. Cordelia wrote Magic in the Gorbals: A Personal Record of the Citizens Theatre (1999), and many books and catalogues on artists; her most revealing was on her student contemporary, the expressionist painter Joan Eardley.
George died in 1990. Towards the end of her life, Cordelia was taken off many arts organisations' press lists, probably on account of her age. Fortunately, Bill Williams's Artwork, Scotland's most independent arts newspaper, gave her the freedom to express her astute views right up to the week she died.
When the National Theatre of Scotland launched Gregory Burke's Black Watch in a variety of ad-hoc spaces, it endorsed everything Cordelia had campaigned for. "A Scottish national theatre is an activity," she wrote. "It has to start with a company, not a building." Who could have said that better?
Richard Demarco writes: Cordelia and her husband, George, were both artists and patrons who shared my belief, in the 60s, that Scotland's world of the contemporary arts should take advantage of the international stage provided by the Edinburgh festival.
They enjoyed the company of artists at their home in Pollokshields, Glasgow, where the conversation would inevitably be inspired by their international collection, which juxtaposed Scottish art with Romanian.
Cordelia supported the most demanding aspects of avant-gardism, notably expressed by the Polish artist and director Tadeusz Kantor and his Cricot 2 theatre productions, which explored the interface between theatre and the visual arts.
I recently organised an exhibition of work by Cordelia, her friend and fellow student Margot Sandeman and Archie Sutter Watt, whose Galloway landscapes they admired. We all celebrated the fact that Cordelia sold a still life of flowers, painted not long after she had graduated from Glasgow School of Art. The sale raised her long-cherished hopes of spending her final days as a painter.
• Cordelia Oliver, artist and critic, born 24 April 1923; died 1 December 2009
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January 26th, 2010 Adrian Searle
Hip, cool and wildly inventive, Chris Ofili burst onto the scene in the early 90s. Now he's ditching the dung and the glitter, and going some place darker
Chris Ofili's new show is a lesson in learning to be free. Not of the shadows cast by other artists, but of his own. Early success makes some artists grow scared of their shadows; they get so stuck with the thing they have become known for that they are paralysed, unable to find a way forward. Ofili, instead, has raced ahead. On Sunday he told me that he is letting his new work lead him where it will.
Now in his early 40s, the Trinidad-based British artist recognises that the coherent development of his work isn't something he need worry about. He is centred and confident enough to know that the work will tell the story. At the end of the 1990s, having become famous for using his signature elephant dung for some years, Ofili told me he was retreating to the studio and staying out of the limelight. By then he had won the Turner prize (in 1998; he was the first black artist to do so), and been vilified by New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who in 1999 objected to the Brooklyn Museum of Art showing his black Virgin Mary, replete with dung-balls and clippings of bums and vaginas from porn magazines. But he didn't escape attention or controversy: in 2005, Tate bought Ofili's 2002 work The Upper Room, a complex installation of 13 paintings in a shrine-like space, designed by the architect David Adjaye. Ofili was a Tate trustee at the time.
Ofili has always played with stereo-types of blackness and exaggerated a ribald exoticism in his work. This is evident from the start, in the 1993 self-portrait sculpture that greets visitors entering the show – nothing more than a small, misshapen ball of elephant dung, sprouting a few of the artist's shorn dreadlocks, and a smile of milk teeth. The exhibition takes us through the development of his paintings and drawings to the present. Much is missing: where are the balls of dung Ofili put up for sale in Brick Lane market, or the dung spliffs, or the "ELEPHANT SHIT" stickers he plastered London with in the early 90s? Where's the lime-green Ford Capri, the one with the elephant bellow for a horn? More pertinently, where's all the sculpture Ofili has made in recent years, the big-haired and pointy-bearded versions of the caganer, a small defecating figure who appears in Catalonian nativity scenes? The artist has left all this out, wanting to see for himself, instead, the development of his painting, beginning with the 1995 Painting With Shit On It, and ending with rooms of recent paintings with no shit at all. The shit is gone.
Babelicious nudes
There is a huge variety and range in Ofili's art: by turns joky and touching, difficult and sexy. His drawings are wonderfully erotic, lively and funny. Along the way, Ofili gets more dense and florid and complex, and then – bit by bit – jettisons the things that made him famous: the dung, the glitter, the multi-coloured, pasted-on genitalia and afro heads. Get up close to his earlier paintings – the surfaces encourage it, catching the light and writhing with life – and you lose yourself in the visual riffs, the art-nouveauish riots of plant life, the chains of dots and blobs, the beats and pulses and beads of colour. It's like listening to multi-layered music on headphones, and being delayed by all the detail.
Stepping back, it is not only your focus that shifts. On top of the fractal grids, the foliage and ripples, lumps of dung thud on the surface. Some of these are mad heads with cheeky, map-pin grins and all-seeing spooky eyes. Others are engorged cocks drooping under their own weight, breasts and – well – lumps of dung. This visual music is structured and held in check by pattern and order, by Ofili's larger motifs and images. There is his stupid blacktastic superhero Captain Shit; there are babelicious nudes with startled eyes and knowing smiles, and the beautiful and affecting No Woman, No Cry – Ofili's homage to murdered London teenager Stephen Lawrence.
From the beginning, Ofili looked cool and hip and outrageously novel. More than a decade on, some of his earlier work looks temporarily dated – or at least stalled by the Cool Britannia 90s euphoria for new British art. This will fall away with time. Late in the show, the tempo slows and the light goes out, both in the gallery and in the paintings. The walls are a sombre grey, the paintings hard to read. Their surfaces are thinly washed and layered in nuanced, dark blues. No matter how much you adjust to the gloom, they resist the eye. The thinner the paint, the more mysterious and impalpable the images are. Things hover in blue twilight: a dead deer strung up in a forest; soldiers riding through trees; two men making music on a wooden platform, a stage that turns out to be a scaffold. While they play, a hanged man dangles naked beside them. I hear imaginary night airs, a lament to the body hanging there. Why is he there?
Ofili has told one interviewer that this presence was provoked by the empty space he had left on the right-hand side of the painting. But it is hard not to think of some colonial outrage, its aftermath on a hot night. What one cannot see – things in the muzzy blue-green dark, a back-story the paintings might and might not tell – becomes all the more tantalising. I fill the paintings up with my own imaginings, and sit on the floor looking into the near-dark for a long time, among paintings that refuse as much as they bewitch. In Ofili's early work, we lost ourselves in stoned, close-focus detail. Now, we're lost among things unseen.
In dangerous territory
The last room bursts into light again. These paintings are hard to read, too. There is Lazarus being raised, his body floppy, his cock rising with him in an erection. In another painting, a naked woman (red hair, red labia), takes a drink from a waiter. She seems to have a halo. Elsewhere, there are figures emerging and disappearing into darkness or just trailing off – unpainted, half-seen and unaccountable. Maybe the artist can't account for them either.
In a painting called The Healer, a squatting figure gorges or vomits yellow fruit. The symbolism escapes me. These paintings are uncompromisingly difficult. This is dangerous territory, and some of Ofili's recent paintings received a mixed reception when they were first shown in New York last year. They feel transitional, in themselves and in terms of where they're headed: sometimes what first appears as mystery or open-endedness turns out to be a lack of resolution. But when they work – and The Healer does, whatever it might mean – they really work. Ofili's confidence carries it.
Until the 90s, there were hardly any black students at British art colleges. Ofili's success showed that, if you have the intelligence, savvy and ambition, being an artist is a career option. Someone has to pave the way. And it was clear from the first not just how ambitious Ofili was, but how individual his take on painting was – once he'd ditched his student style of narrative figuration (funny how things make their return, and are never entirely lost). Rather than living up to his reputation, he is now more concerned to push his art forward. One of Ofili's earlier solo shows was called Freedom One Day: let's see where freedom leads him.
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January 26th, 2010 Jonathan Jones
Flowing, spiralling, massing, falling – all the things fabric worn on the body can do, Veit Stoss does with hypnotising accomplishment, in wood
She holds up her baby for everyone to see, her face downcast, the child bald and almost monk-like. There is a simplicity to their expressions that transports you to the medieval cultural world of the people the German wood carver Veit Stoss made his works for – people who believed, who trusted in images. Yet it is not the faces, or the bodies, or even the sacred status of this work of art in the V&A that holds you and keeps you coming back – but the way he renders the Virgin's robes.
Folded, flowing, spiralling, massing, wrinkling, falling – all the things fabric worn on the body can do, are done by the robes of Mary in this little sculpture. Yet every tweak, rumple, rustle is created, with hypnotising accomplishment, in wood. The very softness and mobility of cloth has been imitated – all in boxwood.
When we talk about the idea of "craft" versus "art", it's easy to forget exactly how multifarious the world of craft used to be. Once, there were wood carvers like Stoss whose sculptures have the power and grace of great art. And while Germany's wood carvers are rightly famous, in another gallery at the V&A you can see a work by Grinling Gibbons that shows such talent also flourished in Britain.
The question is, what did wood offer artists that stone did not? An answer lies in the Virgin's robes. So fragile, so light, so precious – there's a texture to these robes that would be different in stone. Not that marble cannot be sculpted to resemble cloth: by a genius like Gianlorenzo Bernini, it can, as a third masterpiece in the V&A, his portrait bust of Thomas Baker, scintillatingly demonstrates. Bernini's joyous brilliance imitates not just the cut of Baker's lace, but the vitality of his hair – and yet the effect is very different from wood. It is different in feel: more dazzling, maybe, but less heartwarming.
Beauty lies in the particular. Works of art do not follow rules, nor do they assert absolutes. They are never formulaic. To follow the chisel of an artist like Stoss, Gibbons, or Bernini is to see the potentialities of specific materials, touched by a singular talent. It is to encounter not a generalised artistic excellence, but a one-off loveliness. This is a journey worth taking because it will help us to see that everything that matters is unique. Wood is not stone – nor is one wooden Virgin like another. That is the meaning of craft.
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January 26th, 2010 Maev Kennedy
The exact spot from which John Constable painted The Stour Valley and Dedham village almost 200 years ago, one of his best loved scenes, has been traced by a researcher poring over old maps and modern hedges.
It is not just the horse drawn carts and the straw hatted agricultural labourers who have vanished: changes in field boundaries and agricultural use, new lines of hedges and more recent tree planting mean that the serpentine bends of the river and the little village itself have almost disappeared from view.
The scene is a rural idyll with a typical Constable dash of earthy realism. The beloved landscape around Constable's birthplace at East Bergholt provided the artist with inspiration for the rest of his life.
This painting, now in a Boston museum, was commissioned as a gift to comfort the homesickness of an exile: Philadelphia Godfrey, born only a few hundred yards away, who was marrying and moving to north Wales. She would certainly have identified the occupation of the men, and remembered a characteristic country smell: they are breaking up an old dung hill which has been maturing nicely for months, before spreading it as fertiliser on the fields.
The land, like other iconic Constable landscapes on the Suffolk-Essex border, including Flatford Mill and Willy Lott's House – seen in the background of The Hay Wain, once voted Britain's favourite painting – is owned by the National Trust.
The spot where he made the drawings or oil sketches has been traced for most of the paintings, allowing for his trick of sometimes moving features to achieve the effect he wanted, but the high perspective bringing into view two churches, Langham and Dedham, and the Fen Bridge over the river Stour, remained a puzzle until National Trust land agent Martin Atkinson started to compare a copy of the painting with a patchwork of local maps in the Suffolk Records Office.
Atkinson soon realised that the scene changed dramatically even in the artist's lifetime, in the decades after he painted it in 1814-15. Field boundaries shown in an 1817 enclosures map of the area changed dramatically by the time a later map was made in 1830. Some fields had disappeared completely, and new hedges at completely different angles, many now with fully grown trees, plotted the new boundaries.
He was probably painting at the edge of a road which he would later follow down the hill to continue working at Flatford Mill.
Constable's paintings are now among the most beloved and valuable in 19th century British art, but in his lifetime he struggled for financial success and recognition, and could never have married his beloved Maria without money inherited from his corn merchant father. Millions now go on pilgrimage every year to the scenes he painted.
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January 26th, 2010 Charlotte Higgins
No elephant dung, no glitter, no textured, collaged surfaces. It's all a bit of a shock. But do we like Ofili's new work?
I'd seen some of Chris Ofili's new work in the lavish new Rizzoli book he has helped put together. Even so, after walking past so many greatest hits and old friends in the galleries at London's Tate Britain, where his latest career survey opens to the public tomorrow, I got a jolt when I walked into the final pair of rooms, filled with his most recent work. In the first, the paintings are entirely blue – deep, midnight shades of indigo, ultramarine and bilberry. In the second, the paintings are screaming with acid colours: strident purple next to citrus orange; a tintinnabulating turquoise; egg-yolk yellow. And there is no elephant dung. And no glitter.
I have to confess I'm a bit of an Ofili fan. I've always loved the unashamedly stuff-encrusted surfaces of his paintings. So it's a bit odd to see works stripped of their jewels, so to speak.
I'm still figuring out whether I like the new work, which is steeped in the landscape and mysterious atmosphere of Trinidad, where Ofili has lived and worked since 2005. The moment I walked into the final room of the show my heart, I have to confess, sank. Then I looked at the paintings a bit more, and concluded that I kind of liked them. Then I was sure again. There's something slightly off-key about them. In fact, I just don't know. A couple of the recent works were shown in New York in 2007, and the Village Voice critic wrote:
To my mind, what makes Ofili consistently perverse – aside from his habit of turning ostensibly religious subjects into lewd jokes – is that his paintings often flirt with being outright terrible. In the wrong hands, the hyperstylized retro look he employs in these new works could, with just a few bad choices, easily turn into overweening poster art, glib parodies fit only for suburban malls.
I admit to a similar fear. On which side of the good/bad divide do the new Ofilis sit? I'm still digesting them. Adrian Searle has given his view in today's G2. What I love is that Ofili is keeping us on our toes – and is unafraid to change, and, quite possibly, fail.
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January 26th, 2010 Charlotte Higgins
Turner prize-winning artist evolves from dealer in shock to purveyor of colourful perception, as new exhibition shows
In pictures: Chris Ofili retrospective
Think of Chris Ofili and you would be forgiven for imagining the following: elephant manure; the weeping profile of Doreen Lawrence; a black, dung-breasted Virgin Mary that enraged the mayor of New York.
But, when a major, mid-career retrospective opens on Wednesday at Tate Britain in London, visitors will see a new Chris Ofili.
His recent work may, frankly, come as a shock. There is no dung and no glitter. There are no richly-collaged, jangling surfaces. Instead, in the last room in the exhibition, unexpected swathes of colour lash down the canvases: imperial purple dissonant against citrus orange, saffron squealing against sea green.
With the exception of two paintings previously exhibited in New York, none of these eight works has ever been seen in public. They come fresh out of the artist's studio. The exhibition is the first major survey since 1998 of the often controversial 41-year-old's work. Almost a third of the 45 paintings on display have never been shown in the UK before.
All the big hits are here, including the Doreen Lawrence painting, No Woman No Cry, which was exhibited in Ofili's Turner prize exhibition in 1998. There is also a fresh chance to see the famous installation The Upper Room – 13 paintings of chalice-bearing monkeys, a reimagining of the Last Supper.
But it is in the final two rooms of the exhibition that audiences will see a different artist from the one whose last solo show in Britain was in 2002 (when the Victoria Miro gallery showed The Upper Room).
These works reflect new surroundings. Ofili has left the crowded London art scene and, since 2005, has been working in Trinidad and Tobago, living in a cottage in the hills above Port of Spain.
"I felt in some way things had closed down," the Manchester-born artist says in the Tate exhibition catalogue. "London was an exciting place to work at one point, because socially it was very progressive – a catalyst... But it got to a point where the social aspect became claustrophobic ... It also got to a point where I felt the work was really known in a public sense, that the division between public and private was like a thin membrane. And I didn't feel that gave me a greater sense of freedom."
The penultimate room sees Ofili, like Picasso, going through a "blue period". Giant canvases swirl with a dictionary-defying battery of midnight shades: ultramarine, indigo, smoke, bilberry. The colours are so deep and dark that images are hard to read. The only texture comes from the flat paint surface: sometimes velvety, sometimes reflective.
In one, Iscariot Blues, two men play musical instruments under a bridge while a hanged man dangles from a gibbet – all are enveloped in tendrils of lush foliage.
In these and the most recent paintings, the one recognisable aspect of the work is the mysterious figures that inhabit the paintings. Ofili has always created his own semi-mythological dramatis personae, whether the cartoonish, faux-superheroic character he called Captain Shit in the early work, or the simian saints of the Upper Room.
In a painting that has something of William Blake about it, a shower of egg-yolky, lemony blossoms is surrounded by an almost-black ground. On further inspection, the blackness resolves itself into a curious and possibly terrifying creature that appears to be devouring the flowers.
Ofili calls this figure The Healer, and imagines it gorging itself on the blossoms of the yellow poui tree, which flower in Trinidad with intense vividness and fall overnight. "I imagined that The Healer feasts on the poui flowers feverishly, and in the frenzy many of the flowers fall off," he has said.
The Ofili who was once painting phalluses and porn stars in a King's Cross studio is now painting en plein air – he began The Healer, he has said, outdoors during a lunar eclipse, inspired by "the forms in the clouds hovering over the hills that night".
Where once he was bringing all the clamorous life of London into his exquisite paintings as a self-conscious visual analogy of gangsta rap (aggressive lyrics, sweetly sung), he is now more likely to spend his days kayaking or observing the beauty of a Trinidadian waterfall.
In other words, Ofili is still transforming what surrounds him into paint, but these days that's the thick, fertile vegetation of the Caribbean rather than the urban jungle.
He has said of his new environment: "It has a mystical quality to it. The landscape is hilly, the vegetation is dense and you have the constant feeling that things are happening on the other side of the hill or deep in the forest."
By moving to Trinidad he has also retreated from the public gaze. In 1999, the year after he was the first black artist to win the Turner prize, his work attracted controversy when the then mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, objected to the exhibiting of The Holy Virgin Mary at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The painting was touring as part of the Sensation! exhibition of works owned by Charles Saatchi.
In 2005, the Tate bought the installation The Upper Room for £600,000, when Ofili was a trustee of the gallery. The Charity Commission published a report critical of the institution's mismanagement of the conflict of interest involved in the purchase.
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January 25th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art says a Picasso painting damaged by a visitor will be repaired in time for its exhibition of his work in April.
The Actor, from Picasso's rose period, now has a 15cm (6in) tear in the canvas's lower right-hand corner after a woman lost her balance and fell on the painting on Friday during an art class.
The restored painting will be displayed as planned in the exhibition of 250 Picasso works drawn from the museum's collection, which will run from 27 April to 1 August. The museum has owned the painting since 1952.
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January 25th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
The most comprehensive exhibition of Chris Ofili's work to date, featuring over 40 paintings as well as pencil drawings and watercolours, is to go on display at the Tate Britain from 27 January 2010
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January 25th, 2010 Sean O'Hagan
A collection of Polaroids by the controversial New York artist and photographer, who died last year
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January 25th, 2010 Sean O'Hagan
A book of Dash Snow's Polaroids captures snapshots of the artist's life in all its raw, naked and gritty glory. But does it make the grade as art, wonders Sean O'Hagan
In pictures: Dash Snow's Polaroids
It is difficult to look objectively at the images in Dash Snow's posthumously published book of Polaroids, so freighted are they with the baggage of his short life. His death from a drug overdose last year cannot help but lend a valedictory tone to a body of scattershot work that is essentially about how fast and wild that life was lived. In Snow's snatched photography and primitive collages, it seemed like the outsider ethos of hardcore punk finally found its visual voice. And, as is often the case with confessional work of a transgressive nature – William Burroughs, Nan Goldin, Kurt Cobain - life and work are interwined to such a degree that it is hard to look at one without addressing the other.
Snow's life, was to say the least, colourful, and has left behind a fiercely contested legacy. Was he a self-styled outsider and outlaw – "the Downtown Baudelaire" as one American critic put it? Or was he the troubled but not especially talented child of great wealth and privilege? For Snow was born into old money. His grandmother, and greatest champion, is Christophe de Menil, the daughter of French aristocrats who amassed one of the greatest modern art collections in America. "Dash grew up around Rauschenbergs and Twomblys", his European dealer, Javier Peres, told me when I interviewed him in the wake of Snow's death last year, "But, basically, he said 'Fuck it!' to all that wealth and privilege".
Peres also spoke of Snow's long estrangement from his mother, Taya, and his closeness to his grandmother, Christophe, who, it seemed, occasionally bailed him out when the fitful living he earned from his outsider art was not enough to support his wife and young child. Though Snow's troubles were deep and dark, there were many who dismissed him as a messed-up rich kid who just fancied keeping it real with the street kids and skate punks on the Lower East Side: slumming it with a safety net.
Snow's death, after a long and fitful struggle with heroin addiction, makes those questions seem on one level academic, but also adds to the difficulty of appraising his work in and of itself. The book is unlike any other collection of Polaroids I have seen. First up, it's big and wide – a kind of anti-coffee table book. Each photograph is presented actual size as well as enlarged, which makes them seem more arty and more raw. Again, the DIY punk ethos is present. The cover, though, is very post-punk: a matt-black background and what appears to be four titles in plain white uppercase: Freeze Means Run, Everywhere But The Electric Chair, Miserable Mornings, Neverending Nights, Situations Galore. Great titles all, but, as a nagging voice in my head keeps asking, are they ultimately the best thing about the work?
Snow's Polaroids first appeared on the pages of Vice. The anti-art, ultra-real, everything-is-disposable thrust of the magazine, aligned with its terminally cool sneer, may have tainted many people's view of Snow's work from the off. Here, ugliness itself is the defining aesthetic, though it is not the determinedly crafted ugliness of, say, the Chapman Brothers or Sarah Lucas, more the everyday ugliness of hard drug use, wilfully bad tattoos and young people who should know better behaving badly. It is one of the defining tropes of contemporary pop culture that everything illicit should be paraded rather than engaged in discreetly. Everything is not just permitted, but must be photographed, filmed, and posted on the web. In this context, Dash Snow is very much an artist of our times.
Often his photographs seem to celebrate drabness and/or clutter. Grimy bathrooms and dishevelled living rooms abound. The activity he records rends towards the puerile of the criminal, or both. There are snapshots of kids shooting up, kids snorting coke (in one instance on a flaccid penis), kids puking, tagging, flashing and falling down. Blood, nudity, graffiti and cocaine are the recurring themes, as well as Dash himself, the unsteady centre around whom all this determined dissolution is played out. There is desperation in all this too, but it is the now-familiar desperation of the self-indulgently confessional: Nan Goldin without the brilliant composition, the heightened colour or the underlying poetic sadness.
It strikes me that Snow's real strength, though, lies in his capturing the decisive moment on a Polaroid, a medium hardly suited to the action shot. His street reportage highlights a keen eye for movement and motion. There's an artistic perversity here that's oddly refreshing, the notion of making things difficult just for the sake of it. The end results also disrupt the usual thrust of the Polaroid as a purveyor of readymade nostalgia – the instant but already fading snapshot. Though even here, the tendency is towards the raw and the grimly authentic: a guy kicking in a shopfront, a rat diving for cover on a New York street, a friend puking in a long ectoplasmic arc on to the pavement. These images now seem like stills from the film of his frantic life. The Diary of a Beautiful Loser.
The question is, though, do they amount to anything else? Do they approach the mystery and mastery of art? For me, this book leaves that question hanging in mid-air, just as the bigger question of how his work would develop has been left unanswered by his all-too predicable death. It's maybe because of this abiding sense of a life – and a life's work - arrested that one of my favourite of these photographs is of a young man caught mid-flight, leaping from a rooftop, his arms outstretched against a grainy blue sky. Freeze-framed by Snow's Polaroid, for an instant he seems utterly free from gravity's pull. It is, of course, just an allusion, a trick of the camera. Oddly, I always think of it as a self-portrait.
Now see this
Now in his late 70s but still working, Kishin Shinoyama is one of the grand old men of Japanese post-war photography. A dedicated experimentalist, his work concentrates on the female form and ranges from the psychedelic to the formally austere. He recently began re-exploring the solarization technique that Man Ray made famous. A retrospective show of his work, entitled Nude, is on at the Michael Hoppen Gallery in London until 2 February 2010.
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