Visit Sydney, home of the world’s most meaningless, lazy, lurid art
A survey of acquisitions of international contemporary art over the last 50 years reveals bigger is not always better.
Art has been collected in the more sophisticated civilisations — from China to ancient Greece and Rome — for thousands of years, and yet collecting always implies that objects have been to some extent severed from their original vitality and have passed into a kind of afterlife. For if humans make what we call art from the earliest stages of cultural development, it is primarily as a means of articulating their most important beliefs about humanity and the world.
This does not mean that patrons, audiences and members of the cultural community are indifferent to the standard of craftsmanship and other formal and aesthetic qualities; even tribal cultures are aware of the difference between a well-made and a poorly made object, and aesthetic refinement simply means a clearer, stronger but more nuanced quality of form and expression.
As we see from the Renaissance, however, and increasingly in subsequent centuries, true collecting begins when we start to be more interested in the quality of the work, the hand of the artist and his particular sensibility than in the ostensible subject of the work: when we buy a picture not because it is an image of the Virgin and Child but because it is the work of a skilful painter.
The great royal and princely collections of Europe grew in this way, and in due course were opened to the public or, from the early 19th century, turned into public museums. One of the intentions behind the opening of these institutions, and slightly later ones like the Victoria and Albert Museum, was to educate the people in general, and in particular to raise the standards of craftsmanship by displaying the finest examples of earlier centuries and of other lands; but this implicit eclecticism reflected the breakdown of vital and authentic traditions in the age of mass societies.
The collecting of contemporary art, especially by state institutions, has always betrayed a lack of real cultural significance, as though work passed straight from the studio into the afterlife of a museological tomb. At the same time, modern art museums have become increasingly fetishised over the past half-century, and their architecture correspondingly more extravagant, as secular substitutes for religious edifices.
Cy Twombly’s Three studies from the Temeraire (1998-1999)
In the same way these museums, and their contemporary curators, have made great efforts to promote the alleged meaning of the works in their collection, making ambitious claims about their social relevance or moral and political messages. It is as though they were trying to replicate the experience of the believer before an image or icon that was charged with spiritual potency, only now it is more likely to be about one of some currently engrossing social concern that conveniently has no bearing on the real foundations of the economic system that supports the institution.
Leaving this question aside for the moment, there are other and more immediate difficulties with collecting modern and contemporary art. The loss of common subjects and shared stories has coincided over the past hundred years with a decline in the technical training and an increasingly frenetic turnover in styles and movements. This has left almost all modern art collections looking like wardrobes full of the fashions of past decades, most of them not well enough made to have much residual aesthetic interest.
The Art Gallery of NSW is, of course, no exception. This survey covers acquisitions of international contemporary art over the past 50 years, although it includes neither the best of these, the works of Anselm Kiefer, nor the worst, the huge mural by Takashi Murakami commissioned last year by current director Michael Brand for a very large sum of money and shown in the exhibition Japan Supernatural.
If we walk around any other section of the gallery, we will encounter works of varying quality and levels of interest, but generally every room will contain some things that compel our attention for their imaginative content and for the interest of their material form, technical execution or poetic vision. Here, though, it is sobering to see how few works still have a pulse.
This is particularly striking in the first room, where we find ourselves surrounded by abstractions that have aged very poorly in the past half-century — from Morris Louis and Bridget Riley to Sol LeWitt’s more recent attempts to exhume hard-edge abstraction as patterns on fibreglass blobs. In the middle of all this is one of those blue figures on a gold ground by Yves Klein that remind us he was one of the pioneers of vacuous designer branding in modern art.
Two pictures in this room stand out, by Erich Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, not because they are masterpieces or even particularly beautiful, but because they are alive and register some kind of genuine connection both to the world of experience and to history and memory. These pictures, interestingly, instinctively feel as if they should be somewhere else, close to other meaningful pictures of the modern period, whereas most of the others sit inertly on the walls.
The second room begins with a Warhol print of Mao, a recent gift to the collection and a worthwhile acquisition even if by 1972 this treatment of celebrity faces had become a formula for the artist. Otherwise the room is dominated by a rather average Gilbert and George piece, a terrier by the egregious Jeff Koons, and a work by B-list American Ed Ruscha, which was bought for a large sum of money by the Art Gallery Society to celebrate the appointment of the current director.
The most impressive pieces are in the third and central room, but even they are hard to get very excited about. At one end is a large recent work by David Hockney, facing Cy Twombly’s Three Studies from the Téméraire, after Turner, at the other end. On the left is a sculptural figure by Antony Gormley, then one of those large paintings that Gerhard Richter managed to get away with producing in vast numbers so that every modern collection in the world can have one. Next to this is a large painting by Philip Guston that is a good example of his distinctive style.
All of these things were acquired under the gallery’s previous director, Edmund Capon. Facing them on the right wall are much weaker pieces bought by the present management: two light-box works by Jeff Walls, who is a more interesting artist than these rather slight images suggest, and a feeble work by Doug Aitken.
To the right of this central room are two smaller ones. In the first are a couple of large paintings by two of the Italian artists who became prominent with the return of figurative painting in the later 1970s and 80s, Francesco Clemente and Mimmo Paladino, and were promoted as representatives of something called the “trans-avant-garde”, so we duly fell in line and bought one of each. Then there is Tracey Emin, wallowing as usual in a misspent life, and on the other wall one of a large number of paintings produced on the same formula by Zhang Xiaogang, and acquired two decades ago when Chinese contemporary art became fashionable.
The room beyond contains a piece by Anish Kapoor, who at his best is an interesting artist, but has still found the way, like so many other contemporary art entrepreneurs, to make enough product for every museum of contemporary art in the world to have a sample. The centre of the room is dominated by Rachel Whiteread’s Untitled (elongated plinths), made in 1998 and rather impulsively acquired the following year. The most credible and authentic, if characteristically eccentric, piece in this room is a large painting by Colin McCahon.
Almost all of these artists are the predictable figures on every gallery’s shopping list, with little evidence of any individual taste or discrimination or sense of direction. Most significant in this regard is the last space, to the left of the main room and extending around the staircase beyond, which is mostly filled with works recently collected.
One end is dominated by an enormous and remarkably banal Ugo Rondinone, and nearby is an eclectic mixture of contemporary work including one of Thomas Hirschhorn’s figures studded with screws, reminding us just how easy it is to make art with one idea and a cordless drill from Bunnings. In the main space there is a very large but not very memorable late Georg Baselitz and a painting by Michael Armitage, whose recent exhibition at the MCA should have made it clear how minor and unfocused his art really is.
The wall opposite is dominated by a large work by Mark Bradford, made in 2014 and bought in 2015, in which layers of paper have been laminated together on to the surface, painted over and then cut back with a blade creating deep grooves that radiate from several points in the composition. The work appears to be completely abstract, but the wall label assures us there is more here than meets the eye. Apparently Bradford makes “multi-media paintings examining themes of racism, poverty and gentrification”.
“Resembling an outsize road-map,” the label continues, “this work comprises thick layers of advertising posters and fliers from the area around his studio in South Central Los Angeles and abstracted imagery taken from early cartographic practices … In creating this work, Bradford contemplated 16th and 17th-century trade routes and subsequent colonisation of land, commenting how the development of low socio-economic areas often occurs through exploitative trade practices.”
Except that Bradford’s work does not do any of the jumble of things here claimed for it. This label epitomises the hypocrisy of pseudo-political contemporary art: it wants to take credit for political engagement while in reality offering us a bland decorative surface without the slightest suggestion of political content. This is what lets the public in our new contemporary art cathedrals feel a warm glow of moral self-righteousness without being disturbed in any of their lazy, smug or self-indulgent habits of mind.
And this, it would appear, is the future of the Art Gallery of NSW. More work like Bradford’s, or the lurid but basically empty pieces that flank it, one by Stanley Whitney and the other by Dana Schutz, also painted in 2015 and bought in 2016. Why the rush to spend limited funds on such slight work? It seems the gallery is bent on acquiring as much large and meaningless art as it can to fill the walls of Sydney Modern when it opens and impress its corporate sponsors. It would no doubt be preferable to spend the money on building the collection in depth and purchasing work of proven value and enduring interest, but that would require hard work, patience and scholarship, and these do not unfortunately seem to be the priorities of the present gallery regime.
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