Yesterday, I went around three art galleries in Cork city. This was my
seventh visit to The Republic of Ireland's second biggest city
situated. In the south of the country. My girlfriend is from Cork and
we were staying with her parents. Cork has a grubby, down at heel
quality that I like. It feels more authentically a part of the Ireland
I grew up in - rundown but with a romantic aura - and people take you
as they find you. It has a very young population - and very many
attractive alliterative looking girls with great bodies and pretty
features. My girlfriend loves looking at the beautiful girls almost as
much as me! In fact a few times when my mind was on art - she angrily
pointed out I had just missed a stunner! Lol. Cork people have a
rather high pitched sing-song accent which can be comical or
attractive depending on how thick it is.
The first gallery we went to see was the Glucksman gallery, which is a
tasteful, modern, purpose-built gallery of wood, glass and concrete -
set in the beautiful leafy grounds of Cork University. The gallery was
staging a major exhibition of contem****ary Chinese art entitled 'The
Year of The Pig' (the presentyear in the Chinese astrological
calender). The whole of the Glucksman was thus taken up with the
brightly coloured and large scale works on loan from the Sigg
Collection. Dr Uli Sigg is a Swiss businessman and diplomat who has
built up a collection of Chinese art made exclusively from the 1990's
onwards. The exhibition was broken up into themes like; the individual
and society, City vs countryside and the influence of western art on
traditional practices.
For about the last ten years I have heard rumors of great Chinese
artists becoming the toast of New York and Beijing, but every single
time I have actually seen a few of these works I have been utterly
repulsed by the crudity of colour, incompetent drawing and lack of
originality. I was bewildered as to why the art could look so god dam
awful and yet it be so over hyped. Witnessing the insanity of the
current Irish art market I realized the truth about art - do you want
to know what it is? Money ****ing Talks - And Opinion Walks! It was as
true in Egypt as it was in Venice or Paris or New York. If you throw
enough money at your nations art - some sort of genius will turn up or
be manufactured.
I suppose 'The Year of The Pig' has value if taken as one big joke on
the ignorant taste of a Chinese millionaire - whose taste was formed
and distorted by the west as were the artists he patronized. But
aesthetically and intellectually I could not take it seriously as
'high-art'. This I felt was the artistic version of the Chinese market
stall selling fake; Rolex's, Chanel suits and Gucci handbags. But that
perhaps is unfair to the market trader. Because while his sometimes
superb rip offs might be fake - it would only be recognizable so to
the initiated. This art however was blatantly aware of its plagiarism.
In fact much of the work felt like a two fingered salute to western
modern art - a kind of
anything you can do I can do even worse. You may feel I am being too
harsh, but frankly I would deserve the exact same response if I
arrogantly thought I could do calligraphy to match the Sung dynasty
masters!
Some of the work was very effective as gaudy eye candy - but it was
never in the slightest bit original. It would be far too tedious for
me to go through the whole show and point out the not just subtle but
blatant plagiarisms. But suffice to say - I had seen it all before - a
long long time ago. These Chinese artists are even more crass, less
educated and less technically competent than the artists of London's
'cutting edge'. But what they have in common is the luck to be born in
a time when crass billionaires with more money than artistic taste are
willing to fund their idiocy. The same sadly can be said today for
Irish art which is hopelessly over priced and over valued after
centuries of being undervalued and under priced.
Much of this art seemed adolescent both in terms of the individual
artists and in terms of the Chinese state. Lest we forget - China was
one of the most brilliant civilizations the world has ever seen. The
artistry, spiritual depth and dexterity of Chinese art is staggering.
In bronze, jade, lacquer, ****celain, calligraphy, picture scrolls,
terracotta figurines ancient Chinese artists produced work that fill
any connoisseur of art with envy and greed to covet.
What communism did was pulverize this cultural legacy into rubble -
seeing it as elitists and tainted by the misuse of power of the
Emperors. So from 1945-1990 - Chinese art ceased to exist - and in its
place came crude propagandist art that strove to glorify the Chinese
state, the communist leaders and the Chinese people. All of this art
had the flavor of the Orient, but its meat and bones were no different
to the sentiments and scenarios of Nazi or Socialist art. I find this
kind of art contemptible in the extreme - both in terms of its style
and its content. As for the crimes it endorsed and concealed -
there are no words I can muster.
In the late 1990's however, Chinese artists began to create Art works
influenced by American Pop and Conceptual art. The trouble was that
this art was nothing but a piss-take on western art. These artists
clearly had no real understanding of the depths and complexities of
western culture and they merely copied its most iconic elements -
Duchamp's Urinal, Andy Warhol's Silkscreens, Bruce Nauman's video
pieces - you get the idea. Don't get me wrong - I enjoyed looking at
much of this art - but like a bad Chinese take away - it left me with
a sick stomach. The anti-masterpiece of the show for me was ****
Xinning's; 'Duchamp Retrospective Exhibition in China', 2000-2001. In
this very crude photo-realist effort - bewildered Chinese officials
inspect Marcel Duchamp's Urinal (titled 'Fountain' 1917, and signed
'R. Mutt') with a mixture of incredulity and fascination. It neatly
pictured a grand clash of cultures and for me this work honestly
evoked the utter bewilderment of the Chinese when faced with a
scandalous Western art icon.
This show more than any I have ever seen has proved to me the
disastrous effects of Globalization - which has reduced the world to a
vulgar set of approved styles, logos and brand names - gutting in the
process centuries of cultural development. Surely the really great
artists of the future will not be the globe trotting rich trash that
currently are in power - they will be artists who have both a profound
sense of their place in the world and their national heritage.
On our way back into town we visited the Fenton gallery one of Cork's
premier private galleries - which had a lovely space in a converted
warehouse. I had never heard of any of the artists on show (Alan
Boardman, Ciaran Cronin, Tonia Kehoe)- and I doubt I ever will again.
It was the kind of bland insipid and unoriginal abstract art that
hotels and restaurants buy thinking that some fools will consider them
cultured. Well I don't. This stuff and all the other mountain of
abstract art produced in the world today is nothing more than wall
filler. It may be a fact that 99.99% of all the art bought and sold
in the world is of a similar ilk - but I won't lie down and pee on my
chest like a tame puppy the way everyone else seems to! Artists like
this in my opinion are little better than home decorators - though
often a lot less skilled. Why in gods name would anyone buy this ****!
I can only think of one reason - because they think that these are
'major' artists. The fact is they are not- they are parasites on the
corpse of a long dead idiom. So if you know you are not looking at the
work of an abstract genius like Kandinsky, Kupka, Malevich, Pollock,
Rothko, Marden or Richter - why bother paying good money for something
you and your kinds can knock up at home - the way home decorating
programs on TV teach you.
Finally we went to the Crawford Museum - which has grown on me as I
have become more failure with it. Although the Crawford has one of the
most minor collections of Irish art I have ever seen - it dose have a
few gems by Jack B Yeats, John Lavery, Barry Cooke and Dorthy Cross.
While there we saw Irish Art of the 1970's which we had also seen in
I.M.M.A. last year. This retrospective made perfectly clear that the
two dominate trends in Irish art in the 1970s' was abstract minimalism
(as practiced by Cecil King, Anna Madden and Micheal Farrell) and
photo-realism (as practiced by artists like Edward Maguire, Martin
Gale, Robert Ballagh). The abstract minimalist canvases came off
looking more significant than the photo-realist work - though this I
think wa because of how technically simplistic they were to make.
Maguire and Ballagh were really pu****ng themselves to the limits of
their technical abilities something their abstract contem****aries
could not claim. The trouble is their technical skills were not up to
the job. Some people think like these artists - that a good painting
is one in which you paint every crack in the floor ever hair on the
dog and every wrinkle in the face of a fat artist looking at himself
in the mirror- but this is not art! And it is certainly not painting
as Raphael, Rembrandt, Poussin or Ingres would have understood it.
What this show proved was just how seamless Irish artists attempts at
intellectual theft were in comparison to their Chinese counterparts
today. Artists like Farrell subtly infused their work with Celtic
designs without overdoing it. However their work is still little more
than theft devoid of technical challenge. The stand out piece of the
show for me was Farrell's Political Presse Series (1980)- a masterful
and wonderfully inventive piece which proved to me again what talent
Farrell had - but it saddened me to also think how much of it he
squandered in drink and acting up artistically in pubs.
On the second floor of the Crawford we saw the collection of The Great
Southern Hotel collection. As hotel collections it wasn't that bad -
but it was typically unadventurous. Nora Mc Guinness seemed to have
been very popular with the collections head, as she was represented by
over a half a dozen oils and watercolours. Frankly I have never seen
as many of her works. As an Expressionist artist working in 1950's
Ireland she appears a strong figure - but her work overall is too
dour, too gloomy and too devoid of the spiritual depth that all great
expressionist art must have.
If You Want To Check Out My Work Go To -
www.thepanicartist.com
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