Art Wank

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/>

Painting penis

All you Gauguin enthusiasts will know that he often signed his works ‘P GO’. Sometime last year, when we were throwing around ideas about merchandising during the exhibition, someone came up with the lovely idea of commissioning a children’s book, featuring Gauguin’s animals, birds and etc, with the title ‘P GO’.

No doubt it conjured up images of cute little penguins or the like (‘Pingu’ anyone?) Until, that is, it was pointed out that the ‘name’ probably derived from nautical slang for penis.

• Christine Riding, ‘Everybody loves a sailor’, Tate Blog, 20 August 2010, <http://blog.tate.org.uk/?p=1360>

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!

Nick Serota hedges his bets on the election

Interestingly, the commitment to Tate Modern was made not by the Labour government but by a Conservative government, in 1995, when Virginia Bottomley supported the creation of Tate Modern. So Tate Modern has, in a sense, been a crossparty invention.

• Nicholas Serota in interview, ‘Artists, critics and readers on 10 years of Tate Modern’, The Observer, 25 April 2010, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/apr/25/serota-tate-modern-tenth-birthday>

AW: A genius of diplomacy. Whoever is elected on 6 May, you just know Nick will be badgering them for money by the 7th.

HR Wank: Visitor Experience

Tate are advertising for a Senior Visitor Experience Manager (their new name for visitor services). As a visitor, I’d like to manage my own experience thank you very much.

Sewellisms # 10: Negative Descrimination

[Chris Ofili’s] rarity as a black male in the white male milieux of King’s Road, Kensington Gore and Cork Street makes him the perfect candidate for positive discrimination from the Arts and British Councils and all arms and outstations of the Tate.

Brian Sewell, ‘Please don’t give Chris Ofili any more money’, Evening Standard, 29 January 2010

Read more: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/article-23800037-please-dont-give-chris-ofili-any-more-money.do

AW: How does Brian Sewell get away with comments like this? You can’t accuse organisations of positive discrimination without backing it up. Sewell’s claim is based on his own opinion that Chris Ofili’s ‘tinsel tawdry’ is not deserving of public support, but he offers no evidence that the Arts Council, the British Council and the Tate bought his work because he is ‘a black male’, rather than because they thought it was good. Positive discrimination is a big accusation, and one that should never be made without a case.

The crux of his opinion may be revealed by a typical bit of Sewell institutional name dropping:

‘His five years at Chelsea Art School and the Royal College of Art were wasted and irrelevant.’

Once again, the level of an artist’s achievement is assumed to lie in his successful adoption of the lessons and ethos of the traditional art education institutions, while the influence and inspiration that Ofili took from African art is dismissed as ‘utterly bogus’.

Pornographic Banner?

‘Artist Fiona Banner has been invited to create an installation for Tate Britain, eight years after plastering the gallery’s space with a vivid description of a pornographic film.’

Vicky Shaw, Press Association, ‘Artist back at Tate after porn controversy’, The Independent, 18 January 2010
Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/artist-back-at-tate-after-porn-controversy-1871687.html

AW: It looks like the Indie suspect that Fiona Banner’s Duveens commission at Tate Britain (opening 28 June 2010) will be pornographic.

Fiona Banner: ‘I’m looking forward to the prospect of working within the phallic pillars of this extraordinary grandiose space.’

AW: Looks like they’re right.