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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Rembrandt in New York, by Joanne Tod, 1999. Image from Tod's pages on the CCCA website.
Hospital, by Damien Hirst, 2004. Image from David Cohen's review at artcricial.com.
I saw work from Damien Hirst's painting show (see previous post) projected at a recent symposium. They instantly reminded me of the Canadian painter, Joanne Tod. I've been a big fan of her work since I first saw it in art school, back in the 80s. She has making smart, self conscious ugly/beautiful paintings for a long time. From Tom and Joester's respsonses I get the impression that Hirst's paintings are uglier than Tod's. Tod frequently paints scenes of opulence, and the paint handling itself teeters between lush and downright scratchy. How to position this painting? Is it is a cynical statement about the empty gesture of the "artists hand"? Is it a jab at acquistion and commodity? Or is it simply a grab for those collector dollars? In 2002 Tod put on a show called Vanity Fair, in which she rendered portratis of a bunch of Toronto's big-fish-small-pond personalities as characters from the novel. Shinan Giovanni (then gossip columnist for the National Post) wrote in Lola magazine: "...when Tod confessed that I was to be one of the subjects in her show, I was instantly flattered and made to blush. This, you see, is the power of the portrait artist: the subjects always think they're being made love when, in fact, sometimes they're just being screwed."
The same goes for the art audience when confronted with slick, smart, po-mo painting. Are we being screwed? If we are, maybe we like it? It's odd that Damien Hirst has chosen to replay this dynamic in paint, where the epitomes of market cynicism and self-reference have been visited and revisited thoroughly over the past 20 years. In this context, I understand Kimmelman's "moral scold" (as Tom called it in yesterday's comment thread). Granted, Hirst's subject matter speaks to a contemporary level of desperate detachment. But besides offering a historyical study of postmodernism-in-paint, what could Hirst be possibly saying with this treatment other than, simply, "buy this painting"?
On the other hand, maybe it is possible that ironic reference can fold so many times as to compact itself back into sincerity. If there is a contemporary youthful art market really interested in "earnestness, or at least the appearance of it" as Kimmelman suggests, and Hirst can deliver, then what's the problem? Are you "shallow and money-obessed" if you enjoy a painterly painting of a dissected brain, or a morgue, or a bleeding soccer hooligan? Or are you just a reader of magazines, watcher of television shows, disempowered and subjugated protestor of wars, believer that church and state should remain separated, post-AI-proto-cyborgian internet user, in short...an understandably depressed and yet participating member of contemporary western culture?
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Art meets science in Damien Hirst's new show at Gagosian in New York, which I haven't seen. The image on the left is the original photo, the right is Hirst's painting (painted by a roster of assistants with some input from Hirst himself.) A press release at Science Photo Library says: "The paintings signal a new direction in [Hirst's] work - that of photorealism. Photorealism was an invention of the 1960s. Take a photograph, and copy it meticulously, until your painting and the photograph are indistinguishable. From a distance Hirst's paintings look like photographs. But close up you can see that they have all been executed using oil paint and brushes." ...and... "We do occasionally licence our images to artists who want to use them for source material. But until you see the finished artwork, we never know how close to the original photograph it will be. The look and feel of the Hirst's oil paintings is different from the original photographs, although the image itself is almost facsimile reproduction." Michael Kimmelman said in NY Times (available here) "[Hirst's paintings] arrive amid a booming youth market, as shallow and money-obsessed as Mr. Hirst, and just as enamored of fashion, but with a higher premium placed on solo handicraft and earnestness or at least on the appearance of it." David Cohen at artcritical.com says: "If you want to see Mr. Hirst’s careeer in terms of iconoclasm, you could say that by producing 31 dutiful, soporific canvases he has delivered a fatal overdose to painting more decisive than the assassination attempt of his pickled shark. But Mr. Hirst isn’t really an iconoclast. For all his razzmatazz and buffoonery, he is in deadly earnest about the power of images." | |
I've been invited to do a guest questionnaire over at Simpleposie. Survey's up!
Welcome to Clog, a cut below the average blog
Well, it has to happen soon or later, former guest poster Joester has started a blog of his own. Don't miss his inaugural post on the "sometimes snack" and spirituality bracelets.
Thanks to everyone who came out to the Qualia Street Closing Party and Von Bark Lecture last night. It was fun fun fun. You guys are great. Also apologies... I forgot to bring down the very important candies! After we made a special trip to the Bay and everything. Next time.
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