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Lucky Kunst: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art by Gregor Muir is a new book that pretty much does what the subtitle says. A lot of the writing is plodding sludge summarising London, Marcel Duchamp, Neo-Conceptualism, fashion, music and the changing state of the British economy. These parts are like the commentary in a promo film on an international flight about the city you're just about to land in, but extended for millions of years instead of the usual twenty-five second bursts. Reading cliché-ridden paragraphs of inept journalese, which must have been hell to write (or maybe the whole point of never getting involved with anything that has any urgency of original thought is to avoid pain) I kept asking myself, "Why am I reading this?" What does the word 'important" mean, or the word "remarkable," if they're applied automatically to artists and artworks like marmalade on toast?
But then I got drawn in to the personal anecdotes. It's not that they have any personality as such. There's simply something compelling about descriptions of famous people's private carryings-on, even if the describer is not Hazlitt and the famous people are far from Wordsworth and Coleridge. Plus even if the events are completely without any atmosphere whatsoever but instead sound like Londoner's Diary in the Evening Standard only from the point of view of someone who was actually there instead of an outsider.
I liked the account of waking up in a shop window with Jake Chapman in Cologne, and being shouted at by a security guard, after passing out a few hours earlier in what they assumed was a gallery stand at an art fair, which they'd felt compelled to break into in order to switch all the artworks from one stand with all the artworks from a different one.
Being there is the heart of the matter. Gregor (who I know and like) has written a book that makes it seem as if he has no psychological insight into anything, isn't interested in art, only the art world, and thinks the way to show respect to your subject is to be relentlessly respectful with a capital R like a wind-up zombie. On the other hand, unlike some recently spotlit self-loving commentators on the art world, he did something real: he organised shows with artists. If he went on trips abroad with them, hung out in bars and restaurants with them and passed out on the same floors as them, it wasn't because he was acting the parasite but because he was genuinely part of the scene, a producer and a facilitator. After all a lot of YBA art is pretty flimsy in itself. It doesn't have "beauty" as such or some other quality of look-at-ability. Instead obsessive attention goes into the detail of how dubious shit gets presented. The surrounding objects, the atmosphere of the contextualising event, the mini-events that went into the lead-up to the main event, the creation of a sense of spectacle around the absurdity of the main event -- to achieve all that takes creativity and cleverness. Gregor sometimes supplied it and he should be acknowledged for that.
Gregor Muir
What kind of a scene was it? His stories are all about artists and their drunken shouting. He doesn't tell you that they behave like moronic narcissists in so many words (far from it, he is a totally signed-up reverer) but that's the impression you get reading between the lines. Their creativity seems to be tied up with their idiocy. He doesn't give you insights into how this works but after enough anecdotes if you can think at all you do start thinking about it. It opens up the whole story. At least it did for me. The big issue of art today is how to cope with the ghastliness of the scenes you're constantly confronted by. How do you cope with the psychological effect of thinking inside, "I am in hell, " and on the outside saying, "Gosh how marvellous! A working toilet!" Not just now and then but forever. How great it would be to say, for once, "Wow, that's an amazing combination of forms! It reminds me of Velazquez!" Instead of, "No way! A spin painting! How fantastic!" On the other hand a lot of the art is genuinely clever, and old-fashioned aesthetic pleasures are genuinely recast so while they may be unrecognisable they're still pleasurable.
Lucky Kunst is a book of enthusiasm not a book of questioning. There is no mental energy whatsoever. Fervent belief is often stated: the charismatic power of Jarvis Cocker or Damien Hirst is like the power of the King of the Zulus, apparently. You simply have to prostrate yourself -- how could the mere mention of Joy Division not make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up? Unfortunately mere mention alone without any original attempt at expressive animation does tend to make everything sound a bit flat and similar. However the book is worth reading because you're drawn in to a creative world whose subject is contemporaneity itself. If it's beyond the author to critically interrogate the issues, well, enough material is provided for you to do it yourself.
How do you update art? You can't keep wanting it to be something it can't be any more. The artists who do that and the writers who write like that are depressing. Yes it is possible to know what a brush stroke really is, to see a Titian as a living proposition, as a painting with a lot to say, not necessarily about religion and erotic fat women but dignified abstract stuff. But then what do you do with that knowledge? How do you apply it? A world of painterly subtlety, or sculptural subtlety, or subtlety of drawing or etching or whatever the hell else -- a world of impressive abstract achievement, a world of refinement and visual intelligence, of humanity, humane values, a world of human artistic richness -- and then a world of creepy snobbery. How close they can seem. Almost the same thing in fact -- and how refreshing the world of "Look Mum I've done a video of someone having their hair cut!" can suddenly become.
Such a work appears in one of the stories in the book, about a show at the ICA. No one passes out or has a fight. It's just a scenario for the author to make a few points, that ordinary objects are useful to the YBAs because they're tuned in to ordinary life, and by a certain year the YBAs were starting to be officially accepted. We're told that the ICA is "a place of considerable importance." (Not that there might be a causal relationship between this solemn evaluation and Gregor being invited to do some work there). Then we're introduced to a lot of terrible sounding objects and videos. The main thing is a working toilet by Sarah Lucas, which we learn is "one step further" than Duchamp's urinal. (Like 11 is one step further than 10 on the volume dial of the guitar in This Is Spinal Tap.)
Reading this drivel I knew it was drivel but also that what it referred to was genuinely engaging. This kind of object by Lucas is funny because it relies on a myth but also on subtly different levels of myth-absorption, from shallow (the general UK public's recent introduction to avant-garde art) to faux-deep (any art student's indoctrination into the myth of the avant-garde). Her toilet is a stupid object but it has a lot of particles of meaning. At least its joke on meaning has that. But the humour goes a bit tricky -- and you have to wonder who Gregor's ideal reader is supposed to be -- if you have to have an accompanying boy scout lecture on how Duchamp's urinal "entered into legend as one of the most controversial artworks ever made."
The weird thing about conceptual art is that you can easily satirise it because it's so much about blankness, even though it's supposed to be so much about thought -- in fact originally it was about short circuiting thoughts about art that had become ossified or gone stale. It was about refreshing a situation that had gone academic. And in its current phase it's about applying old methods and strategies to a much more expanded field of subject matter, to "life" in fact. "It makes you think" is its unstated but abiding motto but the motto doesn't address the nature of the thinking, which isn't really intellectual or even intelligent. In fact the world of thought has yet to come up with a word to describe it. And the paradox of so many conceptual artists being so incapable of expressing a thought in conversation that doesn't make you feel either sorry for them or irritated by them, or wishing you'd brought something to read, has yet to be addressed in any real or thorough way.
In any case "conceptual art" is hardly anything to do with thinking but -- to return to the weirdness of it -- if you're creative and you want to keep going with art you find yourself constantly drawing on its laws and creeds. The weird thing about this book is that it conveys something of this weirdness without ever seeming to be remotely conscious of how weird it really is. Gregor, whose motivation seems to be to get noticed for having had something to do with something culturally meaningful, takes it for granted that the art of the YBAs is substantial, like Watteau is substantial, only in the 1990s not the 1720s. Sadly this just isn't true. He acts like once ICA-type official approval starts up it's definitely time for everyone to believe without question that the objects of approval have value, not that anything's value still has to be argued, or even that its true value might well be (as with Lucas and the history of avant-gardism) that it sums up in a neat way real problems or questions of anything any longer having any value at all.
Lucky Kunst: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art by Gregor Muir is published in January 2009 by Aurum Press at £14.95.
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Matthew Collings is an artist and writer who lives in London. He studied painting at the Byam Shaw School in the 1970s and at Goldsmith's in the early 1990s. He has written several books including 'Blimey!' and 'This Is Modern Art'. He has written and presented many TV programmes, including the series, 'This Is Modern Art,' which received several awards including a BAFTA. His most recent series, 'This Is Civilisation,' was on Channel 4 in November 2007 and will be repeated on More4 in 2008. A book to accompany the series has been published by 21. Collaborative paintings by Matthew Collings and Emma Biggs can be seen at the Fine Art Society, London.
To watch Matthew Collings' Channel 4 TV series, 'This Is Modern Art', click here. |
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| Published on 19-12-2008 |
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