There is something rather soulless about a lot of mainstream 1980s electronic music - a soundtrack to get your head kicked in to, to get brainwashed to, to mindlessly accomplish meaningless tasks to...
The more I look at it, the more I agree with what Adrian Searle said about the Keywords hang looking like the Nazi Degenerate Art exhibition... I mean ... the writing on the wall, the paintings jostling for space on the makeshift wall...
Of course this is an unhappy accident. The theoretical framework... well I'm ambivalent about that to say the least. For a start, a non-English speaking visitor would completely miss it... (just another gripe about monolingual interpretation...)
And the 1980s is not my decade (though I must say I find the artistic output of that decade considerably less rebarbative than its other cultural produce). However the art is interesting - especially Donald Rodney, Lubaina Himid, and Derek Jarman...
If an SS officer was to jump into a time machine (designed by Wernher von Braun perhaps) he would be able to incorporate it into his twisted worldview with little difficulty. For a start, he would consider all the art on show to be degenerate. Mind you, that was the word they used to describe all works of art which did not adhere to the pseudo-classical, nauseating Fuhrer-cult template. The words "violence" and "folk" would be especially pleasing to him, on the wall on the left as he enters. Folk... with its Germanic roots and dark import (when seen through his ideologically-distorted eyes)
Here is the review for reference: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/feb/28/keywords-tate-liverpool-exhibition-williams
Monday 17 March 2014
Lubaina Himid: A Fashionable Marriage (Cast of Characters - Imaginings)
A concerned young intellectual and revolutionary crouches forward- Malcolm X's kid cousin in the UK. He's off to Mecca with a basket of reading material, but not much else. Certainly doesn't speak a word of Arabic, but no matter, for now. Or maybe a relative of Britain's own Black Power leader (via Trinidad), Michael X? He faces the audience but the towering pretensions of the other players threaten to overwhelm him. Or her? Could either be a 1950s/18th Century hybrid boy or an androgynous young woman? Unclear...
Ronald Reagan's body looks oddly feminine - perhaps because his pose recalls that of Madame Recamier or an Odalisque/Olympia. Help me, I took a History of Art Pill.
Star Wars - Nuclurr Missils - Nuclear paranoia still very much in the air in the 1980s - even I remember that, and I have deleted so much of that decade from my memory banks (I have no memory of much of its deeply unpleasant mainstream musical output)... Cold War still going strong....
Maggie Thatcher whispers sweet nothings into his ears. Apartheid, the Falklands and the sinking of the Belgrano with a sour cherry on top... Plutonium Blonde...
The eyes of Caligula and the lips of Marilyn Monroe... Vous avez les yeux de Caligula et les levres de Marilyn... What a chat up line, Mitterand...
How very seductive... one warmonger to another... both declaring a kind of civil war in their respective countries ... laying them to waste with neo-conservative cold mendacity...
The Hairdresser has not dyed his locks properly. Such a bad advert for his trade but Maggie is too preoccupied to notice. Ever so brassy and orange. The fake-Aryan look failing to convince. This doesn't stop him from bitching about everyone else's style... His cock's turned into a hairdryer, perhaps that's why. So much better to lacquer Mrs T's into nuclear mushroom hardness (shut up Doctor Freud in the back there)
The Art Critic - Swathed in jargon. The rotting Marigolds caress him as he longs for the embrace of words of praise... He has no talent, he is a "churnalist" for the art world.
The American feminist artist with her open drawers. Vile vulvas veiled in smugness. A coquettish glance for all the men in the room. Self-sabotage and ego rampant. She is not worthy of the name (of feminist), being a flimsy no-talent confess-all verbal bulimic who shouts shrill banalities at the assembled company as if they were the Seven Seals...
She is too self-absorbed to notice the tall black female artist who towers over her. She adopts an assertive "tears before bedtime" pose. She surveys the whole tawdry scene - the only one with a truly critical eye...
The detestable yuppie at the private view:
"OK Yah, yah. Quails eggs and cocaine...OK yah, right now, yah..."
Sitting on the fence, ignored by all.
Two artists - trying to shock everyone by embracing (they are both male). No one is paying them any mind. They straddle an over-priced chair which looks like a hangman's apparatus, or perhaps a French revolutionary guillotine... They graduated from Glasgow School of Art recently and are united in an attempt to lose their identities as fast as possible, starting with their accents... They're feeling super-smug as they have landed a major show at a fashionable London gallery (and they are loaded to the gills on the tiresome yuppie's inexhaustible supply of cocaine). The Art Critic is feeling even more pleased with himself than they are, as he is the one who put in a word on their behalf...
Ronald Reagan's body looks oddly feminine - perhaps because his pose recalls that of Madame Recamier or an Odalisque/Olympia. Help me, I took a History of Art Pill.
Star Wars - Nuclurr Missils - Nuclear paranoia still very much in the air in the 1980s - even I remember that, and I have deleted so much of that decade from my memory banks (I have no memory of much of its deeply unpleasant mainstream musical output)... Cold War still going strong....
Maggie Thatcher whispers sweet nothings into his ears. Apartheid, the Falklands and the sinking of the Belgrano with a sour cherry on top... Plutonium Blonde...
The eyes of Caligula and the lips of Marilyn Monroe... Vous avez les yeux de Caligula et les levres de Marilyn... What a chat up line, Mitterand...
How very seductive... one warmonger to another... both declaring a kind of civil war in their respective countries ... laying them to waste with neo-conservative cold mendacity...
The Hairdresser has not dyed his locks properly. Such a bad advert for his trade but Maggie is too preoccupied to notice. Ever so brassy and orange. The fake-Aryan look failing to convince. This doesn't stop him from bitching about everyone else's style... His cock's turned into a hairdryer, perhaps that's why. So much better to lacquer Mrs T's into nuclear mushroom hardness (shut up Doctor Freud in the back there)
The Art Critic - Swathed in jargon. The rotting Marigolds caress him as he longs for the embrace of words of praise... He has no talent, he is a "churnalist" for the art world.
The American feminist artist with her open drawers. Vile vulvas veiled in smugness. A coquettish glance for all the men in the room. Self-sabotage and ego rampant. She is not worthy of the name (of feminist), being a flimsy no-talent confess-all verbal bulimic who shouts shrill banalities at the assembled company as if they were the Seven Seals...
She is too self-absorbed to notice the tall black female artist who towers over her. She adopts an assertive "tears before bedtime" pose. She surveys the whole tawdry scene - the only one with a truly critical eye...
The detestable yuppie at the private view:
"OK Yah, yah. Quails eggs and cocaine...OK yah, right now, yah..."
Sitting on the fence, ignored by all.
Two artists - trying to shock everyone by embracing (they are both male). No one is paying them any mind. They straddle an over-priced chair which looks like a hangman's apparatus, or perhaps a French revolutionary guillotine... They graduated from Glasgow School of Art recently and are united in an attempt to lose their identities as fast as possible, starting with their accents... They're feeling super-smug as they have landed a major show at a fashionable London gallery (and they are loaded to the gills on the tiresome yuppie's inexhaustible supply of cocaine). The Art Critic is feeling even more pleased with himself than they are, as he is the one who put in a word on their behalf...
One for the "Are you for REAL?" Department
...As
the school kids asked Sun Ra in Space is the Place, as he crash
landed into their school, bedecked in outer space Egyptian finery...
People
who are Deadly Earnest (Das Blutige Ernst) must be exhausting to be
around unless you are one of their kind. To wit:
(in the gallery journal where visitor comments are recorded at Tatey)
"Complaint from two female visitors about the heteronormative use of the word "male" on the wall - extended label from Barbara Kruger's "Who Owns What?". They felt that the word "male" should be removed as it was discriminating against (LGBT) and the words "adult viewer" would be more appropriate..."
The sentence in question talks about the established historical fact that for centuries, artists (almost overwhelmingly male) focused their attention on the female form, for the benefit of a largely male audience of patrons and gallery visitors. It then goes on to say that Barbara Kruger wanted to question this, as well as make a comment on the increased commodification of human beings.
In this context, changing the wording would render the whole sentence nonsensical.
Are they members of SCUM? Do they want to obliterate the male of the species, starting with grammatical/grimoire word magic?
Looking for prejudice where there simply isn't any trivialises it for all minorities, who experience very real expressions of hate daily (a holiday in sunny Uganda or Russia anyone?)
Also, while we're at it, I find this American-style (the Deadly Earnest part of American society anyway) proliferation of categories exhausting - so many signs, symbols and signifiers - you've no chance of getting out of the forest of verbiage in one piece.
David Medalla: 1989
“Je vois la temps a
venir quand les analphabètes
sortant de l'âge
des ténebrés et
recouvreront du nid du phoënix les lettres d'or des mots sacrés
émis en secret par le soleil”
“I
see a future time when the illiterates will emerge from the shadowed
age, and recover gold letters from the nest of the phoenix – the
sacred words emitted secretly by the sun”
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