"All is going well at the meeting. The exquisite André Salmon recites his unobjectionable poems and the public is pleased, convinced that it is to be presented with the Art which it loves so very much. But its fatuous self-satisfaction, the smug congratulations to one another upon being seen at a cultural event, is soon destroyed. We enter wearing masks. Behind the masks we shout out a bad poem by Breton, the Big Balled Bastard. Now the audience is no longer happy. A certain anxiety can be felt as citizens look at one another, their expressions uncertain. Is this still art?May they congratulate themselves again?
... This time, I am happy to report, it concludes very decently in riot. Several pieces of furniture are broken and, in the noise, Picabia's last words are missed by many. I believe he is saying something he honestly believes it is important for them to know. He has mentioned this fact of artistic appreciation before. 'If you read literature aloud for ten minutes, you will develop bad breath,' But the audience will not listen to this extremely valuable advice. Most of them are here only because of our announcement that Charlie Chaplin will be the guest of honour. Many others have come merely to bombard the performers with small change from their pockets. They are beginning to realise that Dada must cost them money."
In his 'historical' work of 1990, Exquisite Cadaver, published just before he retired to Ireland to work on making collages, Wolf Mankowitz left us a brilliant picture of the origins in subversion for what is now State/Big Business Academia, as well as reminding us of what today's audiences have forgotten about: namely, informed scepticism. At this time, as the latest cherry-picked Turner Prize 'nominees' are lined up and cuts to the Arts are in the news, we should remember.
In a recent Guardian article, Laura Cumming, who has previously covered the Turner circus without blushing, stood up to declare she no longer believes in it; although with her own kind of reservations:
"Not any more. It has long since outlived its most useful function, which was to raise awareness of contemporary art in a society that often found it strange, forbidding, arcane or just plain laughable.
Consciousness-raising was the Turner's founding aim in 1984. The prize created hoopla, especially when broadcast on national TV with a panel of critics, commentators and artists in violent disagreement. But you cannot manufacture dissent like this without passionate opinions. And while there may be no consensus among the judges – or at least that's what they always insist when publishing their accounts of the experience – I strongly doubt that the issue of who wins the prize nowadays raises anybody's blood pressure.
The world has changed since 1984. Contemporary art is everywhere: bought, sold, debated, displayed, televised, mediated, thoroughly and ubiquitously exposed."
She is right on the ball when she speaks about manufacturing dissent. But the dissent she referred to was that purportedly among the ‘judges’ rather than between the competing artists and the public. And since the late nineteen-seventies, the kind of stuff that is most often referred to by art critics as contemporary art has been, when not pure “conceptualism”, Dadaist pranks recycled by successive generations of art students thinking that no one else knows about Duchamp. In much the same way that, every now and then, a new angry young rock guitarist will smash his axe onstage, doing the Sixties.
And contemporary art was doing pretty well, thank you, before the Turner Prize. I write as one whose first one-man show sold out (in Glasgow) in 1964. Laura Cumming praises with faint condemnation.
Iwona Blazwick spoke up unequivocally in favour of the Turner. She said, "From a public perspective the Turner prize is like the Booker, or the Orange, it guides you, narrows the field. For anyone wanting to know what's happening in contemporary art it's a great starting point.
From an industry point of view it presses a pause button, makes us stand back and take a more focused position. For me it raises questions like: why have these four been picked out of the huge panoply of activity?"
I can answer that, easily. Only those lucky few who are contracted to or shown by that tiny group of specialist galleries like the White Cube, manage to blag a show at one of the state-sponsored galleries like the Glasgow CCA and the Birmingham Ikon, or are championed by the speculative collector Charles Saatchi are added to the short list. No one who has been nominated by ordinary members of the public will even get considered. And, of course, what is happening in contemporary art has absolutely nothing to do with this self-serving party.
Hayden Smith of Metro covered the opening of this year’s Turner collection - yet to be judged, which the Press "threatened" to boycott after they were told to sign contracts agreeing not to publish images resulting in ‘any adverse publicity’ for the Tate. He blotted his copy a little, though, by calling the Award "Britain’s most prestigious - and controversial". That prestige is surely recognised only by the earnest workers in the Arts Council, the leap-frog culture joining the Tates and the Cubes and the Serpentines; and the publishers of a few glossy but vapid art mags.
Brian Sewell summed it up pretty well, and I can thank Mr Smith for this quote: "Most of the art that gets into the Turner Prize is some kind of extremely contemporary rubbish - assemblies of rubbish masquerading under important names."
And Dada is costing us! Now, after all these years, the British taxpayers are funding its idiot children. I propose a government bill to wind down the Arts Council, as a subclause in the Bill to outlaw masturbation while wearing hats.
'Exquisite Cadaver' Wolf Mankowitz
248pp ISBN 0 233 98547 6
André Deutsch 1990
... This time, I am happy to report, it concludes very decently in riot. Several pieces of furniture are broken and, in the noise, Picabia's last words are missed by many. I believe he is saying something he honestly believes it is important for them to know. He has mentioned this fact of artistic appreciation before. 'If you read literature aloud for ten minutes, you will develop bad breath,' But the audience will not listen to this extremely valuable advice. Most of them are here only because of our announcement that Charlie Chaplin will be the guest of honour. Many others have come merely to bombard the performers with small change from their pockets. They are beginning to realise that Dada must cost them money."
In his 'historical' work of 1990, Exquisite Cadaver, published just before he retired to Ireland to work on making collages, Wolf Mankowitz left us a brilliant picture of the origins in subversion for what is now State/Big Business Academia, as well as reminding us of what today's audiences have forgotten about: namely, informed scepticism. At this time, as the latest cherry-picked Turner Prize 'nominees' are lined up and cuts to the Arts are in the news, we should remember.
In a recent Guardian article, Laura Cumming, who has previously covered the Turner circus without blushing, stood up to declare she no longer believes in it; although with her own kind of reservations:
"Not any more. It has long since outlived its most useful function, which was to raise awareness of contemporary art in a society that often found it strange, forbidding, arcane or just plain laughable.
Consciousness-raising was the Turner's founding aim in 1984. The prize created hoopla, especially when broadcast on national TV with a panel of critics, commentators and artists in violent disagreement. But you cannot manufacture dissent like this without passionate opinions. And while there may be no consensus among the judges – or at least that's what they always insist when publishing their accounts of the experience – I strongly doubt that the issue of who wins the prize nowadays raises anybody's blood pressure.
The world has changed since 1984. Contemporary art is everywhere: bought, sold, debated, displayed, televised, mediated, thoroughly and ubiquitously exposed."
She is right on the ball when she speaks about manufacturing dissent. But the dissent she referred to was that purportedly among the ‘judges’ rather than between the competing artists and the public. And since the late nineteen-seventies, the kind of stuff that is most often referred to by art critics as contemporary art has been, when not pure “conceptualism”, Dadaist pranks recycled by successive generations of art students thinking that no one else knows about Duchamp. In much the same way that, every now and then, a new angry young rock guitarist will smash his axe onstage, doing the Sixties.
And contemporary art was doing pretty well, thank you, before the Turner Prize. I write as one whose first one-man show sold out (in Glasgow) in 1964. Laura Cumming praises with faint condemnation.
Iwona Blazwick spoke up unequivocally in favour of the Turner. She said, "From a public perspective the Turner prize is like the Booker, or the Orange, it guides you, narrows the field. For anyone wanting to know what's happening in contemporary art it's a great starting point.
From an industry point of view it presses a pause button, makes us stand back and take a more focused position. For me it raises questions like: why have these four been picked out of the huge panoply of activity?"
I can answer that, easily. Only those lucky few who are contracted to or shown by that tiny group of specialist galleries like the White Cube, manage to blag a show at one of the state-sponsored galleries like the Glasgow CCA and the Birmingham Ikon, or are championed by the speculative collector Charles Saatchi are added to the short list. No one who has been nominated by ordinary members of the public will even get considered. And, of course, what is happening in contemporary art has absolutely nothing to do with this self-serving party.
Hayden Smith of Metro covered the opening of this year’s Turner collection - yet to be judged, which the Press "threatened" to boycott after they were told to sign contracts agreeing not to publish images resulting in ‘any adverse publicity’ for the Tate. He blotted his copy a little, though, by calling the Award "Britain’s most prestigious - and controversial". That prestige is surely recognised only by the earnest workers in the Arts Council, the leap-frog culture joining the Tates and the Cubes and the Serpentines; and the publishers of a few glossy but vapid art mags.
Brian Sewell summed it up pretty well, and I can thank Mr Smith for this quote: "Most of the art that gets into the Turner Prize is some kind of extremely contemporary rubbish - assemblies of rubbish masquerading under important names."
And Dada is costing us! Now, after all these years, the British taxpayers are funding its idiot children. I propose a government bill to wind down the Arts Council, as a subclause in the Bill to outlaw masturbation while wearing hats.
'Exquisite Cadaver' Wolf Mankowitz
248pp ISBN 0 233 98547 6
André Deutsch 1990
Indeed as you say the problem with the "Dadaist joke" is that it is replayed year on year by "artists" who seem to think that we haven't got it yet. Like all old jokes, they stop being funny on the third telling. Marvin Minsky suggests that laughter has a specific function related to the human brain. In his opinion jokes and laughter are mechanisms for the brain to learn nonsense. For that reason, he argues, jokes are usually not as funny when you hear them repeatedly.
ReplyDeleteAnd Dada, at least, was tied to a sense of political revolt - and political revulsion. Good article, though I'm perturbed by the proposal to "outlaw masturbation while wearing hats"; I have few pleasures left to me as it is...
ReplyDelete