(note that this exhibition finishes on March the 27th so if you want to see it you’ll need to get your skates on. I do recommend it).
So, art criticism, where and how should I begin?
Well I’ll start with an excuse. This blog post is going to get very ‘pseudy’ and pretentious. ‘Quelle Surprise’ you might say, but there is a reason for all the ‘art-speak’ which I’ll come to later.
It seems to be traditional to begin by giving some biographical information about the artist. So, taking this from the blurb, Anne Collier is a New York based artist who uses photography as the basis of her work. Now already we have a problem. The fact that she’s New York based immediately makes her cool in a way that you couldn’t be if you were, for example a Nottingham based artist. It gives her work a currency and credibility even before we’ve even seen any of it. I’ll come back to this later too...
Anne Collier’s exhibition consists of a series of photographs. The photographs are all ‘third hand’ images, in that she’s photographed existing photographs, magazines and images and text from books. A film poster, a magazine cover, pages from a book, a jigsaw made from a Jackson Pollock painting and so forth. I’ve put some of them below so you can get an idea, with a little commentary on what I took from each image.
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| Woman with a camera - Anne Collier |
‘Woman with a camera’ is a diptych, both images showing Collier’s photographs of the film poster ‘The Eyes of Laura Mars’ (I’m only showing one above, but they’re very similar). A woman with a camera taking pictures of a picture of a woman with a camera, which in turn is advertising a film about a woman with a camera. It’s a hall of mirrors.
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| Open Book 1 - Anne Collier |
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| Open Book 2 - Anne Collier |
‘Open Book 1’ and ‘Open Book 2’ are both photographs of photographs of landscapes in a book. All photographs are second hand images of reality and I suppose these works are demonstrating this. Is a reproduction at one remove better than a reproduction at two removes? This is a good question when you’re looking at a photograph. If the original and subsequent copies are of the same quality then what value should we ascribe to the first over subsequent prints?
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| Cindy Sherman - Anne Collier |
‘Cindy Sherman’ is a picture of the cover of the Italian fashion magazine ‘L’evolve’ that shows the renown artist Cindy Sherman. Sherman famously takes conceptual portraits of herself when she’s dressed and made up as a series of different women. So, it’s a woman taking a picture of a magazine showing a woman famous for taking pictures. But a woman who is famous for taking pictures of herself as other women. It’s a twisty turning sort of a photo that Collier’s taken. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to mean, but it’s droll. Oh, and the Billy Bragg song 'Cindy of a Thousand Lives' is about Cindy Sherman.
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| First Person - Anne Collier |
‘First Person’ is a series of photographs of pages of a book. The pages list a series of personality traits, the sort of traits you’re asked to compare to yourself in psychometric testing, 5 being ‘strongly agree’, 1 being ‘strongly disagree’. To me, these pictures are playing around with the notion of photography as portraiture, using a photograph to capture something of our inner selves, personality and inner lives. Maybe Collier is suggesting we could just cut to the chase and photograph a list of defining characteristics and dispense with the image of the person altogether? Can we really ascribe personality traits to an image anyway? Maybe it’s an artistic investigation of the ground covered by the ‘Kuleshov Experiment’ in the 1920's when the same expressionless face was shown to an audience in different contexts and they ascribed different emotions to the face (thinking it was a different image).
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| My Goals for One Year - Anne Collier |
‘My Goals for One Year’ is also a picture of a self help book of some sort. Even though the goals themselves are blank, the headings themselves are very revealing. Questions reveal a lot about the questioner’s concerns, preoccupations and attitudes.
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| Untitled/This Charming Man |
‘Untitled/This Charming Man’ uses the image (immediately recognisable to me as an 80’s Indie Kid) from the sleeve of The Smith’s ‘This Charming Man’. Of course Morrissey designed all the sleeves himself, often from non-Hollywood films and a quick look on Wikipedia tells me that it’s a still from the Jean Cocteau 1949 film ‘Orphee’. Collier’s title plays with this, for someone of my generation (and hers) it’s a Smiths sleeve, with all the cultural associations and kudos that brings. For someone older, maybe it harks back to the French New Wave. For someone younger – ‘untitled’, it’s just an image, it carries no cultural baggage.
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| Sylvia Plath - Anne Collier |
‘Sylvia Plath’ is a picture of a record of Sylvia Plath reading her poetry. Is there anything so unrepresentative of a poet than a picture of a recording?
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| Puzzle - Anne Collier |
‘Puzzle’ is a picture of a Jackson Pollack painting from his famous ‘Springs’ period, turned into a jigsaw, dismantled and put in a box. It’s a familiar image, but rearranged randomly. Except of course it’s a Jackson Pollock abstract expressionist piece and so does that really matter? It has no intrinsic order.
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| Cut - Anne Collier |
‘Cut’ shows the picture of an eye, cut in two by an office guillotine. ‘An eye being cut in two’ is a horrible thing to type, never mind contemplate. But it’s only the image of an eye so that’s ok? Oh – and I assume that this image is referencing the famous eyeball slicing sequence in the 1929 film ‘Un Chien Andalou’ by Louis Bunuel and Salvador Dali (which I only know about because of the rather brilliant Pixies song ‘Debaser’ from the exceptional album ‘Doolittle’ – go and get it if you haven’t already – the best US band of the 1980s by a mile and a band I saw at 17 in Sheffield City Hall – still one of my favourite ever gigs).
(You might notice that you can see me taking the pictures reflected in the glass. This seems quite in keeping with the spirit of Anne Collier’s work (a photographer photographing a photograph by a photographer etc) so I didn’t take any more pictures or clear them up in Photoshop.)
Overall I found the exhibition to be accessible and witty. I enjoyed looking at the pictures and left the gallery with a smile on my face. Something was bothering me about them too though and it was only a few days later than I thought was it was.
You can probably see in my little descriptions of each photo and what it meant to me, that I’m citing an awful lot of other artists and other works. This is what bothered me. It seemed Collier's photographs seem to be more about art than they are about life, a sort of ‘meta art’. There’s almost certainly a proper term for this incidentally but I’m not well read enough to know what it is.
I suppose that there’s always a paradox when creating a piece of art, whether it’s a piece of music, writing or a performance. The artist is supposed to put something of themselves into the work, but at the same time, make the work accessible to anyone experiencing the piece. The more personal the piece, the more it’s specific to you, then the more you run the risk making it opaque to other people. Of course if you make it too general, then you run the risk of producing something that speaks a little to everyone but doesn’t really strike a chord with anyone.
The potential problem comes when the artist and the world she lives in are so separated from the world that everyone else lives in. We’re very lucky now in being able to view pretty much any piece of art we like now, via the internet certainly, but in the case of anything in Europe, we could even be there that day with a cheap flight. The days for the need of a ‘grand tour’ around Europe are gone. The palette of experience and references that artists could draw on prior to the 20th century were far more limited to those available now as were their opportunities to speak with and form communities with other artists and patrons. There’s now an appetite for art of all types that there didn’t use to be previously (I’ll leave this statement unsupported but I’m comfortable that the numbers of gallery goers and the level of interest in modern art will support this rather sweeping statement!) All this creates a divergence between the general public and a class of ‘arty types’.
What I think this gives us is a highly literate set of artists and then art aficionados who are capable of deciphering their work. If you’re in the inner circle this is fine. The witty joke of the Bunuel referencing ‘Cut’ will draw a smile from you. But if you’re not in the inner circle? Then it won’t make any sense. It’s just a photo of a picture of an eye that’s been cut by a guillotine. ‘Craftless tat’ as Labour culture minister Kim Howell’s once described most modern art. This is just the sort of piece that will attract the ire of anyone who’s not in on the joke.
I enjoyed Anne Collier’s exhibition because I ‘got’ most of the references, but could you enjoy if you didn’t understand them? I’m really not sure that you could. I think that the problem is that this ’meta art’ relies on a knowledge of the rules and conventions of art to understand how it’s playing with them and subverting them. There’s also nothing wrong with ‘meta art’, it’s important to understand the rules of anything to know it’s strengths, it’s weaknesses, it’s limitations.
You get ‘meta art’ in other genres too. Stewart Lee (a huge favourite of mine – read his book here) is very much a ‘meta comedian’. He deconstructs his own routines as he performs them, deliberately antagonises the audience so he can win them back again and plays all sorts of narrative tricks. This is the reason the Sun call him “The worst comedian in Britain” and the Guardian call him “The best comedian in the country”. They’re both wrong – he’s the best ‘meta comedian in the country’. Other ‘meta art’? Well how about ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead’, Tom Stoppard’s comedy that takes a couple of minor characters from Hamlet and tells their story with the main events happening in the background with the two plays occasionally crossing. If you’ve not seen Hamlet then you won’t ‘get’ a lot of it. The rest of it needs some understanding of how plays are structured and how stories are structured. It’s a brilliant play but doesn’t say nearly as much about the human condition as Hamlet does (I could level that criticism at pretty much any other work too mind you!). Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s film ‘Adaptation’ is another brilliant piece of meta-cinema. I love it as a film, but it’s a complicated thing, with a terrible third act. This is a deliberate piece of self-sabotage, demonstrating the tired narrative conventions of the ‘Hollywood third act’. Do watch it though, because despite all the tricksyness it is a very fine adaptation of the unadaptable ‘Orchid Thief’. I've looked at some examples of meta-art and talked about why I really like them. So what’s the problem with it?
I think that, as I was saying earlier, it's to do the balance between creating something personal and creating something universal. I think that all truly great art finds that universal spirit and brings it out. In 16th century Italy men like Michelangelo and Carravagio were painting scenes based on biblical stories. Stories that were as well know to the poorest urchin in Rome as to the richest merchant. Stories that were of as much of concern to the poorest urchin as to the richest merchant, each man having his own soul and everlasting life to worry himself with. They were able to create works of universal appeal that anyone could look at and take something from. Shakespeare was able to write some of the most sublime plays ever written and they could be understand by peasant and king because they were about the trials, triumphs and heartaches that all lived with. Poets and painters, Larkin and Rembrandt for example, could make something universal and transcendent from the everyday. Larkin’s ‘pull back and reveal’ style allowing him to take a small and personal observation and then find patterns and synchronicities with much larger themes and Rembrandt’s ability to paint a group of fairly ridiculous men and make them look like a gathering of saints. Perhaps it's more difficult now than before to create great universal art. People are so much better read and educated. We’re more widely travelled, we’ve experienced art and ideas from cultures beyond our own. There are so many connections that we make between images compared to previous generations. This sea of contextuality gets in the way of our sharing an understanding. What I mean by contextuality is that even a simple object, for example the chair I’m sitting in now, if photographed or painted, could represent an electric chair, or a throne, or an interrogation or loneliness or a number of other things. It’s really hard to just see a chair as a chair when presented with it in the context of a piece of art. Sometimes it seems like you’re playing a game of Chinese whispers with the artist. A message originates with them, is filtered through all their layers of experience and associations and has to find its way down through all your preconceptions and to speak to you directly. It’s really hard.
So how do you cut though all these layers of context and reference? How do you get to something more primal and honest? Perhaps it’s easier to talk about meta art. It’s easier to be clever than it is to create something truly original. Or perhaps the art world would sneer at something so blatantly populist.
Well here’s one way to the heart of something. On Alastair Sooke’s recent (and really interesting) documentary series on British Sculpture he spoke to Damien Hirst about his piece ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of someone living’ (the 14 foot tiger shark in formaldehyde).
Hirst was explaining that his first thought was to use a huge blown-up photo of a shark, big enough to cover a wall, to confront people of the reality of the shark, but he realised that this wouldn’t work, it’d just be a photo and people would react to it in that way. So he used a real shark, suspended as if swimming, that people could stand next to. This piece was really controversial but Hirst was, I think, trying to get away from all the layers of contextuality to connect directly with the viewer’s ‘animal brain’. “Here is a 14 foot long lump of muscle and power and teeth and it’s coming for you”, he seems to be saying. You can’t see that shark in the flesh without feeling a frisson of fear. You know it’s dead, it’s in a tank, it can’t get you, but still...
This is the problem with ‘meta art’. It can’t exist without art. It needs something honest to subvert. And there’s the reason that Hamlet will still be performed regularly in another 400 years and ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead’ will only be subject to very rare revivals. Meta Art can only be a dead end. Once you’ve understood the rules, you’re still left with them. You can’t change the game.
And meta art forces the use of a ton of ‘art speak’ and jargon in order to talk about it. This is another huge turn-off. This piece reads like something self-consciously highbrow at best and at worst, something misguided and pretentious. But what choice does it give us? There’s also a defensiveness about it and the art world in general. ‘Anne Collier is a New York based artist’. We wouldn’t particularly talk about where any other artist was based and certainly not a scientist (where we’d talk about an institution and not a location). It’s as if we’re supposed to think ‘New York – oh she must know what she’s on about. It’s not for us to criticise.’ And I know that New York is a centre of the international art market but that’s a circular argument for some sort of extra legitimacy.
I suppose art and meta art are like idealism and cynicism. A cynic needs to have idealists to kick against and cynicism is an important check on idealism. But it’s idealists that change the world.
David Millington
March 22nd 2011
Nottingham
