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I think Mark Grotjahn is making a wrong move here
I went to the opening of Abstract America, the new show at the Saatchi Gallery. This gallery is amazing. It must be one of the most beautiful in existence. You feel happy just being in it. I found the show totally enjoyable. I couldn't relate to everything on the same level of intensity but I didn't mind a few objects seeming a bit distanced. I liked the experience of seeing them go by. I don't know why Mark Grotjahn is now painting expressionist eyes. They don't look very good. He should stop doing that. But it's great that Saatchi buys them -- he likes to be the one who's making things happen. He will get Grotjahn through this wrong phase and onto something better. If Grotjahn doesn't shape up, Saatchi can just drop him -- it's a jungle out there!
Actually I didn't like the straight Grotjahn in the show either. It was too lightweight. What's the matter with that guy! He's got a big show on at Gagosian at the moment, but I'm really having second thoughts about going.
What else did I notice? Everything, it all had a lot to say to me, not all of it important but nevertheless this was the hot scene to be at. The really boring scene would have been at some ghastly meeting of Tate people anxiously wondering how to pretend to be concerned about obscure issues. Another bad place for fun as far as I'm concerned would be an editorial meeting at Art Monthly. They'd all be putting their hands up with ideas for interviews: "Let's do one with so and so and make it really anaemic and depressing!" Then they'd all exclaim: "Good idea team! Let's do it!"
Kristin Baker
Kristin Baker is good
I liked a lot of the fury and energy in the transparent brush strokes in Kristin Baker's semi figurative paintings. She is good at creating funny, indeterminate space, with a lively modern look and classically exciting colour (bumped up in a slightly new digital media direction, but nicely done). By "modern look" I mean sort of masking tape meets Photoshop collage, but at the same time going in for frank painterly smearing. I liked the jokes on what the things actually were supposed to be, the scrambled references to old European proper art-culture -- "The Raft of Perseus," for example-- which is camp in a good way.
Sterling Ruby
Sterling Ruby is fun but you forget it pretty quick
By the way, I think "Abstract America" is a good title. All art is abstract. There's a lot of figuration in this show, but it lives or dies according to more important levels of appreciation, the whole Jackson Pollock-Rembrandt stream, which is, if you're serious, profoundly abstract. I felt there was a lack of the utter top levels of seriousness in Sterling Ruby's 'Kiss Trap Kismet', a freestanding red object on one of the middle floors of the gallery. It had a visual principle of something like melting or dripping. I didn't think it amounted to a really persuasive visual statement. But I enjoyed something about it: I don't know, maybe the play of light on the Shredded Wheat-like surface making the solid red seem a bit variegated, or the simple confident rather daft sculptural shape. Whichever it was, it had a tiny bit of brief energy.
Jonas Wood is impressive: many artists would like to paint like this
Good handling of pattern, good arrangement and good light-toned colour -- these were the qualities of Jonas Wood's paintings, which were stylised scenes of suburban life: the textures, surfaces, objects of cluttered ordinary homes rendered in an amusing mix of Hanna Barbara and Cubism. I actually loved these paintings, and I envied Wood's freedom and invention, and his confidence in a simple pleasure mode.
One of the artists was just called Carter. I'm against this kind of thing. However, Carter's paintings deserved respect. Their main visual principle was macro and micro in a rhyming relationship. He disposes cartoonish linear heads about a space in an asymmetrical way. The heads could be seen as blob forms. These greater blobs are divided into sub-blobs, which are divided themselves: layered in mosaic-like sections, with a lot of collaged material supporting different types of marks -- so within some of the blob-heads there's an underlying grid structure. Some of the marks are so thin and light they seem like hair. Other marks are rough painted approximations of a hair-like form. So you've got a situation of marks looking at themselves being marks -- meta-marks. He has blob-like brush strokes that creep asymmetrically across the contained grid structures. Sometimes these blob brush strokes, which appear to have been collaged on, cross the main contours of the blob heads, but mostly they stay within them. There's a lot of structure in Carter's paintings. You can go into the layers forever, because they're so dense, but at the same time the whole thing looks pleasingly casual.
Carter is good at structure
On the way over to Chelsea I'd been into Parasol Unit in Islington to see a show about parades and processions. I thought this sounded exciting, the idea of the carnival aspect of art. It's exciting because you think of extremes, ostentatious display, brigades of people -- riots - revelry. But I was disappointed. I couldn't take much of it seriously. I don't want to see any installations by Thomas Hirschhorn. That stuff is rubbish. Did he read those books? Who cares? Jeremy Deller had two films of some processions he'd organised. In one of them he was really annoying me. The processors went by and you heard his inane voice saying, "Oh cool, that's really cool." I can't accept behaviour like that. The other one was made in Santiago, I think. I much preferred it. I think the paraders were all blind, or in wheel chairs or something. It was a turning upside-down of the expected, so it showed the rules and constraints on what we expect when we're expecting the unexpected -- if it's a parade we don't expect a lot of people hobbling along on white sticks. At the same time why shouldn't they parade and be proud? That other film I was just complaining about was maybe done in Nevada, and it might have been more interesting than I was able to tell. I respect him enough to give him the benefit of the doubt.
I respect Mark Grotjahn enough, in the Saatchi show, to think he might be in a phase of some kind -- I respect experimentation, and I don't say thumbs down just because an artist has been having a go at something other than their logo-recognisable style. The quality of his usual paintings is that they have a graphic presence, a materials presence, and the way they're made makes you think about colour in a different way to normal -- there's something daft about the association with holographic wrapping paper, the way he gets surfaces of the same colour to "sheen" differently. That's a fair enough experiment, for a serious artist to think about that popular visual daftness, and try to harness it. He's not hopeless to try and change from a technique that possibly might have run out of steam. Psycho floating eyeballs in a hairy Van Gogh-recalling style could work eventually, but the example in this show lacked too much.
What else? I always think there's something good about Amy Sillman's paintings. They remind me of Richard Diebenkorn. Sillman does a stylistic version of his interest in light and natural form: he abstracts from something observed, whereas with her it's all kind of known in advance, and nature isn't really on the agenda, though there's definitely a lot of experience and skill there. And as with Diebenkorn I usually forget them pretty soon.
Drinks servers
Very good champagne in a context of eerie pale awesome designer vastness -- excellent
Saatchi is putting on the best art entertainment in town. The whole spectacle of the beautiful drinks servers in a beautiful event was good -- their lively red and white T-shirts bearing the name of the exhibition, against the lovely big delicious paleness of the gallery, and handing out champagne -- that was great.
Matthew Collings
Abstract America: New Painting and Sculpture from America
Until 13 September
Saatchi Gallery
London SW3 |
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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. 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's Channel 4 TV series, 'This Is Modern Art', click here.
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| Published on 12-06-2009 |
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I like this show too.I worry that the gallery is so perfectly presented as an ideal way to see art, really uplifting as an experience,that any artwork given this much air and space and respectful installation, will look beautiful.Does this matter?
greg | |
Best show I have seen this year.The gallery is heaven but I am not interested in Chinese or Arabian art,so this is the first time I have been blown away by a show ,and not just by the building but also the installation of the art with so much space given to each piece,and the obvious pleasure everyone at the gallery seems to get from having so many grateful visitors.I enjoy your writing very much,Mr.Collings - time for another book I hope?
Dana Wilkes | |
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