Culture as commodity

Jean Clair argues that art has lost its cultural underpinnings and has been debased by being identified principally with a market value. This has created a “slide into banality and squalor”. In brief, he suggested that when art possessed some spiritual, religious or cult origins it had significance and meaning, and when its value became solely identified with marketplace gains, that value was entirely spurious. He gives Damien Hirst’s diamond-studded skull a particular drubbing: “exorbitant, scandalous, obscure”.

As this issue has a particular focus on sculpture, we might like to consider the evolution of sculpted forms — small and large — and their links to fundamental human imperatives. There is little doubt that the earliest works were created with specific beliefs and ritual functions in the maker’s mind — not a marketplace. We see this most clearly when we look at some of the earliest carvings from the ice age. And what were their subjects? Overwhelmingly, the female and male form and various animals. This was what ice-age people knew and understood — their own bodies and the bodies of those creatures with whom they shared the bush, the river valleys and plains. And this knowledge was expressed in carvings which embodied some dawning self-awareness, and an awareness of a world outside of themselves. These carved figurines may also have offered some talismanic protection, conferred some authority in the hunt and celebrated fecundity. And tellingly, they must also have awakened in man the pleasure in creating something with his own hands — and doing it well.

One remarkably sensitive carving, which featured in the ongoing collaboration between the British Museum and the BBC4: A History of the World in 100 Objects, is Swimming reindeer. The Museum’s director Neil MacGregor asks the question: ‘Why does man the toolmaker everywhere, turn into man the artist?’ In this delightful work the artist has exploited the shape of the curved tusk to create a small female reindeer with a larger male behind her, both moving through water. As MacGregor observes: “It’s a superbly observed piece — and it can only have been made by somebody who has spent a long time watching reindeer swimming across rivers.”

The human form, animal forms and their mythical hybrids continued to galvanise the sculptor down the centuries. While sculptors like Henry Moore and Giacometti never ceased to explore the human form, many others, whether they were working in bronze, steel, marble, granite, wax or perspex, stopped looking for inspiration in the real world altogether. Naum Gabo or Alexander Calder spring to mind. In this issue we showcase a number of distinctive sculptors who are in the stables of sturdy commercial galleries and we feature an interview with one of Australia’s longest stayers: Ron Robertson-Swann.

Throughout the western world, stone carvings — naturalistic and imagined hybrids — have adorned churches, cathedrals and civic buildings, but today the opportunities for the sculptor seem diminished. He or she must find private patrons, compete for public commissions and hopefully find a sympathetic art gallery to exhibit his or her offerings. The sheer scale of the works (in some cases), the time expended, the intractability of the materials and their cost make sculpture one of the most fraught arenas of the art world.

And this brings us back to the comments of the second party, Robert Hewison, who took Jean Clair to task over his complaint that ‘culture’ had become commodified — an instrument for economic purposes — and his narrow interpretation of ‘cult’ and ‘culture’ which, in fact, also means ‘cultivation’ — in the sense of assisting something to grow. Today’s museums such as the Centre Pompidou and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao have replaced the cathedral as principal enshriners of art, but that is perhaps a reflection of a more secular society — a more educated society — and one that champions a more inclusive anthropological view of our world.

June 2010

Still life — on the move

Our May issue has a particular focus on the art of still life — and it is by no means confined to painting. Alexander Seton, for example, has carved teddy bears and collapsed soccer balls from Carrara marble. This honours a tradition which goes back thousands of years and found some its most profound expressions in Greek and Roman statuary, but at the same time he is playing with what we know of the objects he releases from stone and what we know about his material — with skill and wit.

A New Zealand counterpart, Joe Sheehan, has done something not dissimilar with jade — or greenstone, as the New Zealand varieties of this stone are known. His carving of a now defunct offering from our culture — the cassette tape — in translucent jade restores, after a fashion, its life. Jade is extremely tough, obliging the artisan to grind away at it, rather than carve it, so this material has its own particular challenge, one which the cultures of China from Neolithic times onwards understood perfectly.

aAR also looks at the intricately composed photographs of Robyn Stacey, who has trained her lens on the collections of Elizabeth Bay House, and the astonishing carnival of animals behaving like humans in the canvases of Kate Bergin. We also feature the crisp theatrical compositions of David Eastwood and Thornton Walker’s lyrical gouaches with floating bowls. Each one of these artists has made still life the central element of their current practice.

Still life has a long history. Some observers like to say that convincing three-dimensional representation, which created the illusion of realism or naturalism on a flat surface using the principles of mathematical perspective, didn’t make an appearance till the late Mediaeval period, when the likes of Giotto and Masaccio created people who were lifelike and convincing. Yet the Romans clearly had the skills to create still life in their frescoes. Take, for example, a frequently reproduced fresco of peaches and a robust clear glass jug with water in it from Herculaneum (c.AD 50). Its three-dimensional credentials may be a little shaky, but it demonstrates that there was a precedent for what became an overriding concern of many painters in the northern European lands in the seventeenth century.

And yet, as the hierarchy of the arts solidified, still life trailed well down the list after the loftier subjects of history and mythology (which meant the escapades of the Greek gods and goddesses or biblical themes) and landscape and portraiture. This did not deter (among others) Chardin, Giorgio Morandi (whose bottles huddle together like siblings in a sepia photograph) or Adriaen Coorte. Each of these painters created canvases where everyday objects are infused with some mystery — some sense of the unique — without us necessarily being able to identify what makes them so.

Spanish and Dutch painters specialised in a variety of painting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, depicting rotting fruit, snail trails, broken vessels, gutted fish and decomposing skulls. Such images belonged to a particular variety of still-life painting called memento mori (be mindful of death), which reminds us that everything now alive will soon be dead, and thus not to be too sentimental about nature, whose plan is always to recycle us on the compost heap.

Finally, there is a case to be made for the British artist and showman Damien Hirst, with his menagerie of animals floating in their own tanks of formaldehyde, being less of an iconoclastic contemporary practitioner than an artist belonging to two longstanding and venerable traditions: the preserver-embalmer and the creator of the ‘still life’. There is little to separate Hirst’s shark in a tank from the legendary display of racehorse Phar Lap’s heart; not in its method of display, and not in its notoriety. Thus, some of the most interesting still life today, we might conclude, is right under our noses in local museums — as much as our art galleries.

April 2010

The ancient Romans paid the ancient Greeks the ultimate compliment of copying Greek marble statuary down to the last toenail and nipple. To the ancient world and even the Renaissance world, the idea that forms and motifs have no precendent, that is, have sprung from nowhere, would have been meaningless.

Only in our modern age, with its obsession with so called ‘originality’, do people like to claim, or demand this virtue – if indeed, it is one. The ancient world was more interested in continuity and emulation, which is why Egyptian art has such long-lived and sturdy characteristics.

And here we come to Sam Leach’s winning Wynne prize entry. Apparently, Leach made no secret of the fact that Adam Pynacker’s 1660s painting: Boatmen moored on the shore of an Italian Lake underpinned his own work — even if he didn’t draw attention to it in his entry form description. Should the Art Gallery of New South Wales trustees have noticed the spirit of a former age in his painting?

The trustees have a lot of paintings to assess at prize-giving time. It is not unkind to suggest, that as the carnival of colour passes under their noses, and their minds possibly wandering to their business interests, any connection between Leach’s work and that of the Dutch painter would only have entered the mind of a true art scholar – and these, when it comes to art gallery trustees, are thin on the ground.

What has been lost in the scuffle, is the sheer quality of Leach’s work. Those who are familiar with his hairbreadth detail and his mirror-like lacquered surfaces would understand that his painting techniques are quite different from 17th-century painting techniques, but every bit as painstaking. Pynacker had an immediately identifiable style — as does Leach. If the work in question was hung in a room by itself with no marker, no identification, would the seasoned Australian art-world gallery-goer know it was by Sam Leach? The answer here is … of course.

Renaissance artists were always extracting motifs and forms from each other’s paintings, sometimes as homage, sometimes to bring a potential client over the line or join the fashion fray. Either way, painting from a painting is just a variation on painting from a scene constructed in a studio or painting outdoors.

In past centuries, copying the work of the master in the studio, helping out with the master’s own work, and even executing entire commissions under his eye, were highly developed and important aspects of daily practice of the busy artist’s atelier. Many of these works, masterfully executed, would cloud the waters of attribution and de-attribution in our own times. However, Sam Leach’s work will never be confused with its inspiration. Only if it were, would there be a truly ethical dilemma.

As for the charge of not being an Australian landscape. Consider almost every landscape painted here between 1788 and 1820 —a most have no more to do with the Australian landscape than Leach’s, but they still hang in state galleries as part of their Australian collections. They are, like Pynaker’s and Leach’s, idealised landscapes.

And, as to the discussion about the rules related to entries for art prizes, we might consider how the stipulation of the Archibald prize — that the winning portrait be ‘preferentially of some man or woman distinguished in the arts, letters, science or politics’, has been eroded over the years, as more and more artists, who feel distinguished, paint themselves — and win.

One can only agree with The Australian’s Thursday 15th April editorial “It’s hard not to appreciate a stoush that puts the meaning of art, life and the whole damn thing up against Kevin Rudd’s health policy – at least for a day or two.”