Art Wank

Sewellisms # 23: Cliché counter

1 panjandrums

1 jabberwocky

1 piffle

3 feminist

1 feminism

• Brian Sewell, ‘Away with the fairies with Susan Hiller’, Evening Standard, 3 February 2011, <http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23920219-away-with-the-fairies-with-susan-hiller.do>.

AW: Sometime I think he puts in the Sewellisms and then writes the article around them. As ever in his review of Susan Hiller ‘feminism’ is taken to be a wrong-headed and outdated phase, rather than a serious belief, approach or political stance.

A complexity it excludes or muffles

Hayley Tompkins; Days Series 2007
Courtesy The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd © Hayley Tompkins
Gouache on wood, spoon
3x13.1x2.1cm

Hayley’s work is risky. Perhaps, you think, this is just a piece of stick with some silver gouache and photographic trimmings on it? Well, that’s exactly what it is. But at the same time it’s a perfect index of a set of lost decisions, the shadow of a sensibility formed by all the gratuitous complexity of contemporary life, a complexity it excludes or muffles.

• David Musgrave on Hayley Tompkins’s Days Series (2007), Tate Etc., 21, Spring 2011. <http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue21/watercolourattenborough.htm>

AW: We were with you for the lost decisions, shadow of a sensibility and muffled complexity bit. But you lost us with the thing about its being a piece of stick with paint on it. Talk sense man!

Turner trouble

Turner Prize bosses made an exhibition of themselves yesterday, by trying to ban any bad publicity.

[…]

The row blew up after members of the Press were asked to sign a form which said journalists could not publish any images or words which would “result in any adverse publicity” for the exhibition.

• Tom Pettifor, ‘Turner Prize in another mess as art bosses try to ban bad publicity’, The Mirror, 5 October 2010, <http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2010/10/05/prize-idiots-115875-22609674/>

Sewellisms # 22: Muybridge

Had Muybridge been able to record the movements of Lady Hamilton’s Attitudes we might have understood the erotic charge that so fascinated Nelson and led to his seduction, but for this his ingenious camera was a long half-century too late.

• Brian Sewell, ‘Motion Pictures from Edward Muybridge’, The Evening Standard, 9 September 2010, <http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23876025-motion-pictures-from-eadweard-muybridge.do>

AW: Where did that come from?

Sewellisms # 20: Pricks, dicks, bums and bosoms

The pricks, dicks, bums and bosoms of the saucy postcard mingle with the riotous rumpy-pumpy episodes of Rowlandson; the silken elegance of Beardsley’s tumescent penises puts to shame Grayson Perry’s monstrous strutting phalluses, veinous with over-use, masquerading as Hans Andersen.

• Brian Sewell, ‘A stick of rock, cock? Tate Britain gets smutty’, The Evening Standard, 24 June 2010, <http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23848885-a-stick-of-rock-cock-tate-britain-gets-smutty.do>.

AW: Right, we’re there!

p.s. don’t anyone tell my female co-editor about Sewell’s summation of Sarah Lucas’s piece as ‘the wanking forearm, for example — surely an expression of feminist envy’. Ouch!

Sewellisms # 19: Bronzed Bodies

‘nude women bathed, nude boys drew swords from scabbards, and nude Nubians stood guard. The small bronze was, it seems, a genre of art in which the nude, male and female, could abandon modesty and its futile wisps of drapery and stand full frontal at eye-level on the mantelpiece.’

‘it is at its best with nude male figures, either singly or performing some ghastly ritual of death or torment on some other male.’

• Brian Sewell, ‘Beautiful Bronzes from Ancient Rome’, Evening Standard, 27 May 2010, <http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23839088-beautiful-bronzes-from-ancient-rome.do>

AW:  Sewell really brings to life the beauty of boys bronzes.

Phillip Allen: When is a painting more than the sum of its parts?

‘A parallel contrast arises between the dollops of inactive paint on the edges and the paint rendered deliberately in the centre by the artist’s brush – raising the fundamental question, when is a painting more than the sum of its parts?’

• PRESS RELEASE, ‘Phillip Allen, The urgent hang around’, 3 June - 10 July, Bernier/ Eliades Gallery, Athens. <http://www.othercriteria.com/blog/2010/05/>

AW: Um. I don’t know. When its representational? When it refers to something outside of itself? When its good? I give up. What’s the answer?

‘The contemplation of each work as a whole warns against any linear reading and the pitfalls of trusting language to decode image’

AW: Oh.

Questioning the very existence of images

‘Introducing a disruptive element that twists or changes reality, without ever neglecting the aesthetic value, he creates a movement of attraction and repulsion, which poses the problem of the very existence of images and their meanings.’

• Press Release: ‘Superveilance – Mat Collishaw’, Galleria Raucci/Santamaria, Naples 14 May - 16 July 2010

AW: Ambitious much?

Wacky Art: Another pile of dog doo

‘last year a swan was alleged to have choked to death on cotton hanging from an artwork in the lake.’

• ‘Wacky art show at Pally’, Muswell Hill Journal, 27 May 2010, <http://tinyurl.com/2v8mh35>.

AW: Art exhibitions don’t get much more controversial than that. We’re looking forward to this year’s controversy, ‘pimp my poo’, yet another work in the genre of dog doo-based artworks. See previous posts:

1. http://artwank.tumblr.com/post/428276035/more-art-about-dogs-pissing
2. http://artwank.tumblr.com/post/396375233/taking-the-piss
3. http://artwank.tumblr.com/post/155653882/dog-pisses-all-over-warhol

‘The worst art exhibition in Britain’

With a broom propped up against a wall and pieces of wood strewn across the floor, it looks like the builders have clocked off or taken a lunch break.

But thr [sic] scene is actually a display in a gallery and some angry punters have branded it “the worst art exhibition in Britain”.

• ‘Punters call art show “the worst art exhibition in Britain”.’ The Daily Mirror, 6 May 2010, <http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2010/05/06/punters-call-art-show-the-worst-art-exhibition-in-britain-115875-22237467/>

AW: What this article nowhere acknowledges, however, is that these mundane objects by Susan Collis at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham are actually painstakingly produced trompe l’oeil sculptures made of precious materials to mimic rubbish. See: http://www.ikon-gallery.co.uk/programme/current/event/364/since_i_fell_for_you/

I haven’t it so I can’t pass comment on the quality of the exhibition, but an article that brands a show ‘the worst art exhibition in Britain’ really needs to give some notion of what it is all about, instead of entirely misleading the reader as to the nature of the art works on display. I suspect that the author of this article did so little research that (s)he did not even realise that the sculptures were not what they at first seemed to be.