What does it mean when an extraordinary series of paintings currently on view at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt by René Magritte, which look so uncannily fresh and new, were actually produced in a five week period in 1948, in a style that the artist invented purely to confound and annoy the Parisian public? Magritte’s période vache is an anachronism, an exercise in perversity in which was the celebrated artist’s response to the opportunity for a solo show in a city that he’d left in 1931 and with which he’d had a fractious relationship ever since.
These 17 oil paintings and 20 gouaches combine to form a kind of anti-Magritte, an incoherent rattlebag of styles and techniques that through their joyful freedom actually embrace what he so emphatically resisted in the neutral, anonymous painting style for which he is still best known. I am in fact reminded of Rodney Graham’s recent foray into the history of Modernist painting, ‘Wet on Wet – My Late Early Styles’ (2007) – a similarly mischievous digression into dilettantism, and the unapologetically transgressive pleasures that go with it. Tellingly, however, following the exhibition of these works Magritte wrote to his friend Louis Scutenaire that it was primarily his ‘abhorrence of sincerity’ that prevented him taking ‘further steps along this path’.
On reflection, these works are an important (first?) step on a journey through painting that was joined just over two decades later by artists such as Jörg Immendorff and Georg Baselitz in Europe, or Philip Guston in the USA, and then subsequently by artists such Martin Kippenberger, Maria Lassnig, George Condo, Sean Landers and even Paul McCarthy. These figures all like to play in the same mucky sandpit of grotesque figuration, dark comedy and bawdy sexuality. It is pleasing to think of Magritte clearing the space for such an important and fruitful discourse in a brisk two-month career cul-de-sac to which he’d never return. I almost want to say that what is remarkable here is that he achieved this by making paintings that ‘didn’t really mean it’. Remembering however his comment to Scutenaire, what makes the series really extraordinary in the wily artist’s oeuvre is that he meant it too much.
As if we need proof of how sexy the contemporary arts are to brand managers these days, Vauxhall Motors is the latest company to glue-gun their shiny badge onto an art project – this time a bundle of six commissions worth a total of £120,000. The cross-disciplinary prize will be awarded by a ‘Style Council’ of around 35 representatives from the fields of craft, design, film, art, fashion, photography and theatre, including our very own Tom Morton.
These ventures are so complicated from the point of view of the art press. Their variable quality aside, there is the looming suspicion that even writing this, however sceptical I might be, I’m simply helping to build the brand’s profile. After all, all press is good press. And the frequently cloying verbal styling of such projects (the six winners of this prize supposedly will form ‘The Vauxhall Collective’) can tread all over the developing presentations of young artists.
Companies either seem to be becoming bolder in their demands for visibility in their supposed philanthropic gestures, or the world of contemporary culture is becoming more comfortable working in the shade of such obvious branding. GSK Contemporary, a project space sponsored by Glaxo Smith Kline at London’s Royal Academy next November, seemed to be a new low in terms of brash and incongruous brand alliance, until Chanel’s Mobile Art pavilion emerged this summer. An improbable tryst between fashion, big business, architecture and art, an exhibition (including figures such as Daniel Buren, Sophie Calle and Nobuoshi Araki) was staged in New York’s Central Park inside a pavilion based on a Chanel handbag and designed by Zaha Hadid. A year ago this would have sounded like crass satire. This year it’s part of a pattern that also includes Hermès’ H-Box video suite at Tate Modern.
This is not a phenomenon solely afflicting contemporary art. In this blog I had planned to vent my disbelief at the level of commercial compromise evident in formerly hard-hitting director Shane Meadows’ new film Somers Town, paid for by (and effectively a puff piece for) Eurostar. The I discovered that the good people at Creative Review had done my job for me.
It’s not that as a member of ‘the creative industries’ (though I shudder at the phrase) I’m ungrateful for this patronage. After all, young artists can benefit hugely from opportunities such as Vauxhall’s prize. I’d just ask the brand managers and advertising execs to handle them sensitively (and not make fools of their clients), and artists to be wary of gifts that can seem too good to refuse.
Congratulations to Bruce Haines, of Camden Arts Centre and Ancient & Modern Gallery in London, on his appointment as curator of the next Venice Biennale’s Welsh Pavilion.
First it’s a Brit (Liam Gillick) asked to represent Germany, now it’s the director of a commercial gallery curating a national pavilion. Is this a precedent? Probably not, although I can’t remember a previous example. In 2011 can we expect to see Yvon Lambert curating the Australian Pavilion or Gavin Brown putting together a show for Romania? Stranger things continue to happen.
