More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
25 May
This exhibition at Tate Modern (@Tate) is about to finish (on Monday 26 May).
Its curation is almost as curious sometimes as some of the objects (or their juxtaposition) in the recreated exhibition, which Hamilton organized for The Festival of Britain in 1951, Growth and Form (in Room 1) :
Perhaps, somewhere, there is a room-guide equivalent to the text that appears, in the free exhibition booklet, to describe Room 1 and 2, but, if so, it is well hidden* - the appearance is of walking into Growth and Form with nothing to explain what it or its relevance are. It is good to show these things (as was also done with other exhibitions, a few months back, at the ICA (@ICA)), but there needs to be an introduction. A small ante-room with a video-loop, perhaps (if such footage exists) of Hamilton talking about the show, might have helped place it for visitors.
In any case, though Hamilton may have been (since he was nothing if not someone who observed carefully) ahead of his time in intuiting forms of patterns of growth in - to name but a few - plant, crystalline and shell development, structure and growth that have since been linked to fractals or The Fibonacci Series, this may not be the best place to start with him, nor may it be Variations on the theme of Reaper (1949) (in Room 2) (please see below).
For, in the choice of exhibits, display and interpretational material, one simple question seems not to have been asked (or, if so, the answer not carefully enough considered) :
Who is this Hamilton retrospective for ?
Is it something that, as with the big Damien Hirst show, people could wander into and around, such as they did past and even through his severed cow and calf, and make of it what the immediacy of the canvases, objects and videos conveyed*** ? Or, if people are to be able to value Hamilton's contributions to the British art scene and beyond, do they need a little more guidance (which the Hamiltonian enthusiast - keen to see some works live, but with a greater initial idea of these things - could ignore, if he or she wished (as could any level of visitor in between)) ?
In relation to Reaper, it is not as if we are being chronological, since it pre-dates Growth and Form by two years, but then, as with many recent Tate shows, we do generally adopt that approach by period : in the meantime, after the 1951, we have confronted the visitor with fifteen etchings of a reaping-machine, from all sorts of angles, and with varying techniques and levels of detail.
In this connection, the following point, which is made in the Introduction, would be more aptly drawn to the visitor's attention here :
He often produced several versions of a particular work rather than a single 'finished' piece [this suggests, however, that the versions have the status of sketches or maquettes, rather than being complete in themselves], and throughout his career explored new printmaking methods and digital techniques.
However, as the Introduction has been placed on the wall, the assumption is that the visitor has read and digested it, or seen it the booklet presented at the door, by the time that Room 2 is being viewed... Hate it also as a kiddies' version as one might, what is often said about Cubism is arguably as relevant here, e.g. that there is a response to Einstein on relativity and / or Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle*** in giving us multiple views of a face - or a reaper.
As to this choice of exhibit, maybe there is merit in something produced whilst Hamilton was still at the Slade, maybe not (would one normally go as far back as art college ?), but there seem to be no obvious answers to the following questions in choosing or presenting the piece :
Where does Reaper fit into an account of Hamilton's entire work ?
How does the visitor know that it has that relevance ?
One may hate the description of Hamilton as 'the father of Pop Art' (not least as, in connection with the Bridget Riley exhibition in 2003, Tate was keen to put her in a different relation to art history than that of a pioneering exponent of Op Art), but one is in danger with coming out of this show not knowing (though Room 5 says quite a bit about Pop Art - at this stage) :
* What Hamilton did as an artist
* What his importance was to other artists or the art world
* His significance to appreciating Marcel Duchamp - though some explanation seems to be here, in (the booklet for) Room 8 - and, more importantly, who Duchamp was and what it was that Hamilton valued
* Likewise Kurt Schwitters and the Merzbarn ?
* Why one has seen five or six times the image mainly known as Swingeing London 67 [this one is (and owned by Tate Modern) - what do the four or five others add to seeing it ?
The Tate has not only long owned Hamilton’s reconstruction of what is often, in brief, referred to as Duchamp’s Large Glass (properly called La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (1915–1923), but has for many years had it on display at Tate Modern without (or without adequately – except here) explaining that this is not Duchamp’s original work***, which is too fragile to move (and in Philadelphia). Here, at last, matters are a little less unclear, but does one get much notion of the significance of what Duchamp had been working on between 1915 and 1923 through what is written in the room-note and shown in display-cabinets ?
In other words, who would know what Hamilton was doing in reconstructing this work – and why – who did not know already ? And what does the exhibition do to explain Hamilton’s involvement with the publication The Almost Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (Arts Council of Great Britain, 1966), what it is and why it was published ? Yes, there are two copies, one displaying the green cover, the other the title-page, but nothing other than the sketchiness of the room-note to convey the answers to these questions to the visitor (the Tate web-site, linked to here, is a different matter altogether) :
1915 – 1923 / Reconstructed 1965 – 1966 / Lower panel re-made 1985
The glaringly unstated sub-text of all this is that not only did Hamilton curate a Duchamp show for Tate, but went about reconstructing the work for it : maybe all this is there, if one buys the book of the exhibition, but what, then, is the point of the exhibition itself, if not to explain the exhibits and what significance they have qua exhibits… ?
Work in progress - more to come...
End-notes
* The last of these, too, were well hidden - which may be shorthand for saying that they had been put somewhere unideal, too. In this show, the Introduction did, as one checked, appear on the far side of Room 1 (Growth and Form), actually on one wall of Room 2 - with the room-guide for both Rooms on the wall where one went into Room 3...
** The spirit of Heisenberg is tacitly evoked later on (Room 7), with exposures of figures on a beach that have been enlarged over and over, and achieving greater proximity only at the cost of precisely the detail sought.
*** However, Duchamp did inscribe Hamilton’s reconstruction, as if it is the equivalent of the original. Here is what the Tate's web-page for the work much more usefully tells us :
The reconstruction took exactly a year to make. When Marcel Duchamp came to London for the opening of his exhibition, he agreed to sign it and inscribed it on the back 'Richard Hamilton | pour copie conforme | Marcel Duchamp | 1965'.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Showing posts with label Damien Hirst. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Damien Hirst. Show all posts
Sunday 25 May 2014
Saturday 1 December 2012
Short films at Festival Central (4) - Man in Fear (2011)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
2 December
* Contains spoilers *
Director / writer : Will Jewell
This film gives a delightful interchange between a constable manning a desk in the station (Tim Healy, credited by IMDb as Sargent (sic) Brown, though he does not, as I recollect, have a Sergeant’s stripes) and the film’s protagonist Anthony Fox (Luke Treadaway), which, whilst not literally at the centre of Man in Fear, at least gives us an insight into what Fox fears.
Not in a derivative way, I was reminded of a scene in Luc Besson’s Angel-A (2005), where a similar desperation leads André Moussah (Jamel Debbouze) to seek arrest in the cells as sanctuary (equally, there’s Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life), but Healy’s PC was delightfully erudite, delightfully abrupt, and simply, in a superbly bluff British way, not willing to entertain what he was being told or what was done. (Not until afterwards, anyway.)
Beforehand, Treadaway brought us all the early fluster from North by Northwest (1959) of trying to prove the reality of what is happening to him, only to find that no one wants to listen, of being confronted by this PC who throws Damien Hirst and his suspended sharks in his face. In between, is the audience, to whom Fox's paranoia is palpable, and in whose hands - almost - his character’s fate seems to lie.
Much more so than Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant), evading the fate of being Kaplan, Fox has a sense of vulnerability, of being – unsympathetically - thought to be in psychosis, when maybe his big overspilling bundle shows what he says…
A palpable playing with the borderline between being ‘in fear’ and what others will make of one’s fear, this film is a gem, given 9.0 on IMDb.
Back to the Joy of Six menu from here
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
2 December
* Contains spoilers *
Director / writer : Will Jewell
This film gives a delightful interchange between a constable manning a desk in the station (Tim Healy, credited by IMDb as Sargent (sic) Brown, though he does not, as I recollect, have a Sergeant’s stripes) and the film’s protagonist Anthony Fox (Luke Treadaway), which, whilst not literally at the centre of Man in Fear, at least gives us an insight into what Fox fears.
Not in a derivative way, I was reminded of a scene in Luc Besson’s Angel-A (2005), where a similar desperation leads André Moussah (Jamel Debbouze) to seek arrest in the cells as sanctuary (equally, there’s Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life), but Healy’s PC was delightfully erudite, delightfully abrupt, and simply, in a superbly bluff British way, not willing to entertain what he was being told or what was done. (Not until afterwards, anyway.)
Beforehand, Treadaway brought us all the early fluster from North by Northwest (1959) of trying to prove the reality of what is happening to him, only to find that no one wants to listen, of being confronted by this PC who throws Damien Hirst and his suspended sharks in his face. In between, is the audience, to whom Fox's paranoia is palpable, and in whose hands - almost - his character’s fate seems to lie.
Much more so than Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant), evading the fate of being Kaplan, Fox has a sense of vulnerability, of being – unsympathetically - thought to be in psychosis, when maybe his big overspilling bundle shows what he says…
A palpable playing with the borderline between being ‘in fear’ and what others will make of one’s fear, this film is a gem, given 9.0 on IMDb.
Back to the Joy of Six menu from here
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Tuesday 11 September 2012
Leopard Generate is selected
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 September
That'll be the name of my fifth novel (which I'll pay Will Self to ghost-write, if he could do anything quietly...), so remember - in a subliminal way - that you read it here first.
I am informed that an alternative modern-day pigmentation is undoubtedly purple, but do they mean purple? : looking at, being cruel, Damien Hirst's so-called spot-paintings (or a paint-card) convinces me that I don't know my puce from my eblow (elbow, even, as I am not 'licensed' to talk about e-blows before the watershed).
As to bringing back the semi-colon, I have just done it on Twitter - as with Peter M. and Michael P.*, it has spent its time out in the wilderness, can be welcomed back into the fold, and become the fatted calf (if it's half-lucky).
@OpiumBooks is now, as a good friend calls it, Twitterating (with) me : can't it get a bit dull just having titles on a topic less of interest to me (than ever it was) since, at the time of its release, seeing Robert de Niro wasting his life as David Aaronson** in Once upon a Time in America (1984)?
Which might take me to Inception (2010), but I had to leave last night's screening, so we won't go into that just now...
So I shall simply close with a comment (allegedly) made by Keith Lemon (or was it Keith Tangerine - or Grape?):
To be in a position to acquire this objective, I can invest hours in entrance of the mirror to get my look correct
Right on, baby - but don't give up Dave's job!***
End-notes
* Oddly, I tend to think of his surname as being Portaloo... (Didn't you realize that the product was called after a family name?)
** I had remembered his nickname as Toots (touch of Dustin there?), but Noodles seems plum crazy even now!
*** Whih is what, on the pattern of Russell Hoban's hugely affecting novel Riddley Walker, is the fate of that phrase, I deem.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 September
That'll be the name of my fifth novel (which I'll pay Will Self to ghost-write, if he could do anything quietly...), so remember - in a subliminal way - that you read it here first.
I am informed that an alternative modern-day pigmentation is undoubtedly purple, but do they mean purple? : looking at, being cruel, Damien Hirst's so-called spot-paintings (or a paint-card) convinces me that I don't know my puce from my eblow (elbow, even, as I am not 'licensed' to talk about e-blows before the watershed).
As to bringing back the semi-colon, I have just done it on Twitter - as with Peter M. and Michael P.*, it has spent its time out in the wilderness, can be welcomed back into the fold, and become the fatted calf (if it's half-lucky).
@OpiumBooks is now, as a good friend calls it, Twitterating (with) me : can't it get a bit dull just having titles on a topic less of interest to me (than ever it was) since, at the time of its release, seeing Robert de Niro wasting his life as David Aaronson** in Once upon a Time in America (1984)?
Which might take me to Inception (2010), but I had to leave last night's screening, so we won't go into that just now...
So I shall simply close with a comment (allegedly) made by Keith Lemon (or was it Keith Tangerine - or Grape?):
To be in a position to acquire this objective, I can invest hours in entrance of the mirror to get my look correct
Right on, baby - but don't give up Dave's job!***
End-notes
* Oddly, I tend to think of his surname as being Portaloo... (Didn't you realize that the product was called after a family name?)
** I had remembered his nickname as Toots (touch of Dustin there?), but Noodles seems plum crazy even now!
*** Whih is what, on the pattern of Russell Hoban's hugely affecting novel Riddley Walker, is the fate of that phrase, I deem.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Thursday 19 July 2012
Things that art keeps secret from me... (2)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
20 July
Continued from Things that art keeps secret from me... (1)(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
20 July
With the ten Medicine Cabinets (1989), as with Pharmacy (1992), if you know what the former contents of the packets, bottles and pill-boxes were used for, there is no pharmaceutical rationale behind how they have been arranged: for example, three different styles of labelling of Senokot bottles (god, E.M.I. and Anarchy), and two of Gaviscon, (Seventeen and E.M.I.), appear in unrelated cabinets (each one named, in order, after the tracks of the Sex Pistols' album Never Mind the Bollocks... .).
For all that is said about Hirst’s curatorship, the fact that an anti-psychotic or an anti-depressant is seen side by side with something quite unrelated such as a pain-killer leads me believe that it is the aesthetic appearance that has influenced the arrangement within the display-units. (This cannot as easily be seen from what the Tate’s catalogue features for Pharmacy, as it does it a relative disservice in depicting it, compared with the earlier works.) The lower shelf of Seventeen, at the right, contains a whole jumble, and, at the far left, a big brown glass bottle obscured by an item in front (as in other cabinets, e.g. No Feelings, Pretty Vacant and Bodies).
If then, as with Lullaby, the Seasons (2002), it is the overall effect that it is important, not the pills, tablets and capsules themselves, but their effect against their mirrored background, then anyone looking at these old containers of medication without thinking how they have been put on the shelf is missing a major element.
But what do people who profess to like Hirst's work see when they look at such things? No one seems to look at the so-called spot paintings (I have been to the show severeal times), and people seem to wander around the spaces created by Pharmacy (1992), and by the Medicine Cabinets (1989) as if what is there is a reverential re-creation of a curated store for medication.
But, if so, what are the four bowls with honeycomb and honey, each on top of a podium of a kind intended for reaching things down from upper shelves?
Do they normally occupy the otherwise placid evocation of a pharmacy, complete with those four sinuous vessels full, each one, of a coloured liquid? (Which one looks most like it would be fun to drink?)
It's normal in this installation, because it was previously so at Tate Britain, something about the self-styled Young British Artists (how young is young, Damien?).
Things that art keeps secret from me... (1)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
20 July
With reference to Damien Hirst's exhibition at the Tate* (not an exhaustive list):
* A dozen or so of these so-called spot paintings exist, and I think that the claim is that they are all on the walls of TM
* Their titles, as TM has a mania for keeping them separated far right or far left with a long line of works in between, can therefore no longer be the jokes that Hirst must have intended for them
* For example: the link for Anthraquinonone-1-Diazonium Chloride takes you to the actual and relatively modest compound, supposedly depicted in a fairly large canvas of some 35 of these circles by 25
* Artistic uncomposition no. 7 is, perhaps, just as meaningful, but, if people could easily see these titles (rather than shuttling to the end of the room and back), would they make people believe that, in colour, Hirst has portrayed a chemical structure? (Not, I suspect, anyone who knew even a bit about chemistry...)
* And, with the two that are painted onto the wall of Rooms 2 and 3 of TM, what is their status? Do they cease to exist when scrubbed off to make room for the next show - and do we believe that, if there is a known design for them, Hirst himself painted all of the circles, and that, until he does so again (somewhere else) they won't exist?
* I call them 'circles', because they are circles, and often too big to be spots
* It is also not an illusion - the cicles are not 'equal to the size of the spaces between each [circle]'**, but the inter-circle spaces are often appreciably bigger
* Not to mention Iodomethane - 13c, foolishly represented by a fold-out in the catalogue, when the original must be around 15 metres long, with many a circle, and no meaningful connection (unless Hirst was high on this substance during its creation) with the scale of the painting
* The room steward whom I asked, although very friendly and helpful, had to suggest asking the curators by filling in a form: had it been Hirst's intention, I wondered, to ensure that - because the dissected cow in her two halves was in the way - it was not possible to see the whole painting, except by standing at either end and looking across, which then introduced effects of patterning caused by bunching, the nearer that the circles were to the other end
Continued in Things that art keep secret from me... (2)
End-notes
* Or, rather, the exhibition at Tate Modern of works by DH.
** Circles separated by a distance equal to their circumference.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
20 July
With reference to Damien Hirst's exhibition at the Tate* (not an exhaustive list):
* A dozen or so of these so-called spot paintings exist, and I think that the claim is that they are all on the walls of TM
* Their titles, as TM has a mania for keeping them separated far right or far left with a long line of works in between, can therefore no longer be the jokes that Hirst must have intended for them
* For example: the link for Anthraquinonone-1-Diazonium Chloride takes you to the actual and relatively modest compound, supposedly depicted in a fairly large canvas of some 35 of these circles by 25
* Artistic uncomposition no. 7 is, perhaps, just as meaningful, but, if people could easily see these titles (rather than shuttling to the end of the room and back), would they make people believe that, in colour, Hirst has portrayed a chemical structure? (Not, I suspect, anyone who knew even a bit about chemistry...)
* And, with the two that are painted onto the wall of Rooms 2 and 3 of TM, what is their status? Do they cease to exist when scrubbed off to make room for the next show - and do we believe that, if there is a known design for them, Hirst himself painted all of the circles, and that, until he does so again (somewhere else) they won't exist?
* I call them 'circles', because they are circles, and often too big to be spots
* It is also not an illusion - the cicles are not 'equal to the size of the spaces between each [circle]'**, but the inter-circle spaces are often appreciably bigger
* Not to mention Iodomethane - 13c, foolishly represented by a fold-out in the catalogue, when the original must be around 15 metres long, with many a circle, and no meaningful connection (unless Hirst was high on this substance during its creation) with the scale of the painting
* The room steward whom I asked, although very friendly and helpful, had to suggest asking the curators by filling in a form: had it been Hirst's intention, I wondered, to ensure that - because the dissected cow in her two halves was in the way - it was not possible to see the whole painting, except by standing at either end and looking across, which then introduced effects of patterning caused by bunching, the nearer that the circles were to the other end
Continued in Things that art keep secret from me... (2)
End-notes
* Or, rather, the exhibition at Tate Modern of works by DH.
** Circles separated by a distance equal to their circumference.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Saturday 2 June 2012
The last days of Yayoi Kusama's Tate show
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
2 June
I need another hour to finish looking at this exhibition, as I am not in the league of two ladies who once, in this very members' room at Tate Modern, declared that they had 'done' one in an hour and a half, because they had graduated from a course in history of art - and I think that they intended to polish off the other one in a similar span. I have no notion of what they did or not absorb or how quickly, but thirteen or so rooms is too much for me, so I work within my limits, and skulk off for a coffee - or something stronger, maybe even food at London prices - when I need to, and, if I have time to go back and want to, I do.
My viewing, then, is incomplete, but I am already sure of two things: that Yayoi Kusama sometimes has a distinctive voice (and then tends to demonstrate her extremely great capacity for creativity), but sometimes does not, and that work, to me, then seems pretentious, and not imbued with the same sure artistic sense. Her friendship with Joseph Cornell, for example, clearly brought out a prodigious talent for collage, which is visible in the pieces exhibited in the corridor that is room 9 (and we are lucky enough that Kusama has allowed three of Cornell's works that she owns to be shown).
I am also insufficiently convinced that what are eagerly called phalli are any more than potatoes or their tubers (as the appearance of the Phallic Shoes of room 8 amply testify), and someone has therefore not been entirely trustworthy, given the scope for Freudian and other interpretation, in applying this deliberate description. Yes, there may be a generative principle (there had been an organic, yet cosmic, quality to Kusama's works in watercolour and gouache in room 2), and the Yellow Trees of room 11, for example, writhe with an energy that, my own psychoanalytic profile apart, is a burgeoning, even threatening (as the coils of serpents have the power to crush), power of nature. Other canvases in that room and from the same period, such as the triptych of Weeds, have a more benign quality of reproducing and filling space.
At some point, we will be faced by the question (and some curatorial interpretation) What does all this filling mean? We are told that it is Kusama's obsessional side (which came out in the series of Infinity Nets), but, although it doesn't prove that she hasn't got one, is it different from or more or less creative than Damien Hirst's Medicine Cabinets (1997), with its ten bought cabinets (each named after a track from Never Mind the Bollocks...) filled with empty medicine packaging, which is supposedly arranged according to some medical curatorship or taxonomy.
Is Kusama's filling of a canvas, whether in the mid-1950s or since, really ridden with angst? Somehow, I doubt it any more than there is really any collecting in procuring the preservation (or, more likely, arranging for others to procure it) of empty tubs and packets of medication:
If one did question that proposition on my part, then, with the display-cabinets full of stainless-steel (assumed) surgical implements (some surely are not!), can one believe that Hirst did much more than get a rep to bring around a good range of samples, which, with no real regard to anything other than entertainingly (and aestehtically) fitting multiples of them in the cabinet in question, he tried on the shelves and then ordered as many as he needed. (A task probably best delegated to an assistant, even, whose judgement would be sufficiently good, as would the willingness of the rep to supply on a sale-or-return basis, that minimal rearrangement would be necessary to perfect the work.)
'You can't sell art like hot dogs or ice cream cones at the Venice Biennale', they said. But I believe them to be wrong. I think that art should be within the price range for the masses rather than a few wealthy individuals.
This comment, made (I think) contemporaneously, refers to what appeared to be the constituent elements, akin (as far as I can tell) in appearance to Magritte's alleged stylized cow-bells, from the arrangement of which Kusama's installation had been made. She was selling them off for two dollars apiece, which would have been a real bargain (until she was stopped). Compare this with Hirst's going directly to the market with the huge auction of his works a few years back...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
2 June
I need another hour to finish looking at this exhibition, as I am not in the league of two ladies who once, in this very members' room at Tate Modern, declared that they had 'done' one in an hour and a half, because they had graduated from a course in history of art - and I think that they intended to polish off the other one in a similar span. I have no notion of what they did or not absorb or how quickly, but thirteen or so rooms is too much for me, so I work within my limits, and skulk off for a coffee - or something stronger, maybe even food at London prices - when I need to, and, if I have time to go back and want to, I do.
My viewing, then, is incomplete, but I am already sure of two things: that Yayoi Kusama sometimes has a distinctive voice (and then tends to demonstrate her extremely great capacity for creativity), but sometimes does not, and that work, to me, then seems pretentious, and not imbued with the same sure artistic sense. Her friendship with Joseph Cornell, for example, clearly brought out a prodigious talent for collage, which is visible in the pieces exhibited in the corridor that is room 9 (and we are lucky enough that Kusama has allowed three of Cornell's works that she owns to be shown).
I am also insufficiently convinced that what are eagerly called phalli are any more than potatoes or their tubers (as the appearance of the Phallic Shoes of room 8 amply testify), and someone has therefore not been entirely trustworthy, given the scope for Freudian and other interpretation, in applying this deliberate description. Yes, there may be a generative principle (there had been an organic, yet cosmic, quality to Kusama's works in watercolour and gouache in room 2), and the Yellow Trees of room 11, for example, writhe with an energy that, my own psychoanalytic profile apart, is a burgeoning, even threatening (as the coils of serpents have the power to crush), power of nature. Other canvases in that room and from the same period, such as the triptych of Weeds, have a more benign quality of reproducing and filling space.
At some point, we will be faced by the question (and some curatorial interpretation) What does all this filling mean? We are told that it is Kusama's obsessional side (which came out in the series of Infinity Nets), but, although it doesn't prove that she hasn't got one, is it different from or more or less creative than Damien Hirst's Medicine Cabinets (1997), with its ten bought cabinets (each named after a track from Never Mind the Bollocks...) filled with empty medicine packaging, which is supposedly arranged according to some medical curatorship or taxonomy.
Is Kusama's filling of a canvas, whether in the mid-1950s or since, really ridden with angst? Somehow, I doubt it any more than there is really any collecting in procuring the preservation (or, more likely, arranging for others to procure it) of empty tubs and packets of medication:
If one did question that proposition on my part, then, with the display-cabinets full of stainless-steel (assumed) surgical implements (some surely are not!), can one believe that Hirst did much more than get a rep to bring around a good range of samples, which, with no real regard to anything other than entertainingly (and aestehtically) fitting multiples of them in the cabinet in question, he tried on the shelves and then ordered as many as he needed. (A task probably best delegated to an assistant, even, whose judgement would be sufficiently good, as would the willingness of the rep to supply on a sale-or-return basis, that minimal rearrangement would be necessary to perfect the work.)
'You can't sell art like hot dogs or ice cream cones at the Venice Biennale', they said. But I believe them to be wrong. I think that art should be within the price range for the masses rather than a few wealthy individuals.
This comment, made (I think) contemporaneously, refers to what appeared to be the constituent elements, akin (as far as I can tell) in appearance to Magritte's alleged stylized cow-bells, from the arrangement of which Kusama's installation had been made. She was selling them off for two dollars apiece, which would have been a real bargain (until she was stopped). Compare this with Hirst's going directly to the market with the huge auction of his works a few years back...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)