Jargon Busting

In response to ‘Why it’s time for galleries to drop the jargon’ by Christina Patterson

Published in the ‘i’ newspaper Tuesday 5^th February 2013

This article, by Christina Patterson, puts across the view that “the art world uses words everyone else has dropped”. Patterson argues that this language is old-fashioned and is used as a way to make mediocre art seem more important. She also complains about the practice of contemporary artists; suggesting that their anti-capitalism was false and their work is repetitive.

Upon my first reading of the article, I have to admit, I was in agreement. As an advocate for accessibility and a supporter of ‘End Oil Sponsorship of The Arts’ I was pleased that she was arguing for more clarity in The Arts and raising awareness of “a world in which art is bought by hedge funders as an investment and a brand”.

But then I started to imagine a world without descriptive language: it would be awful. Patterson complains about the over-use of synonyms: “why they seem to think it’s better to use the word ‘notion’ rather than ‘idea’, or the word ‘narrative’ rather than ‘story’…” I would argue that exact words help to give meaning with more accuracy. I think language is an intrinsic part of the art and the exhibitions; art is not just the paintings on the wall; it is the building, the leaflet design and the language used – these all transmit the ideas of the artist. As an Art History student I have often become frustrated whilst trying to read visual arts criticism and not understanding the words used, but you know what I did? I got the dictionary out and learned something.

And when writing my own criticism I get the thesaurus out too, because artists basically do one thing: create, and there are only so many times you can use the word ‘create’ in a piece of writing before it gets boring and you sound incompetent.

As for young people using language “which seems very, very old-fashioned now”, what kind of language does she want us to use? “This exhibition is totes amaze” – now that would be a travesty.

Whilst we’re on the subject of visual arts criticism; Patterson suggests that it “often doesn’t seem to be all that critical”. Of course promotional writing and catalogues (the examples of language in the article) are not going to be critical – their aim is to attract visitors, and yes, sometimes buyers. As for actual critical writing, I would say that contemporary criticism is more balanced than it used to be. I often read reviews of exhibitions in which the writer says what they felt was missing, how they would have liked to have seen the works displayed. Surely this is better than the days when taste makers told us what to think and tarred exhibitions with the phrase: “A pile of rubbish!”

Patterson also suggests that art galleries use this language to hide something: “that the work wasn’t very good at all.” Surely art is objective? Furthermore, Patterson says that this artwork that they are over exaggerating may not be “worth thinking about” and that artists keep asking the same questions, leaving all the answers to us. I would like to suggest that art is supposed to make us think, make us feel something – it provokes discussion, which in a world of mind-numbing television is surely a good thing. For example, the work of war artist Xavier Pick makes us ask questions about the humanitarian situation in Iraq in a way that five minutes of biased news coverage cannot.

Now to the accusation of false anti-capitalism: “you might wonder why, if the artist hated capitalism so much, that the work was so often for sale”. When this issue is brought up and people are complaining about the huge sums art is sold for, I think of artists from working-class backgrounds laughing behind the backs of the ‘fat-cat’ bankers who paid the extortionate amounts for their work. This may be my inner socialist talking, but I reckon taking from the rich and giving to the poor has got to be a good thing, even if it’s not quite anti-capitalism. The fact that contemporary artists such as Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst then give generously to charities makes this even better. Someone once said (though I can’t now remember who): “You have to be part of the system in order to corrupt it.”

Although I agree with Olivia Patterson that there needs to be more clarity and accessibility in The Arts, I think there is a time and a place for descriptive, academic language. I believe that language is an intrinsic part of the artwork and that ‘dumbing-down’ our language would be a great loss. I think that a balance is being re-addressed in the art world: galleries are focussing on education and discussion and criticism is becoming more unbiased, artists are donating their time and money to communities in need and social media is enabling a creative revolution. At a time when The Arts is being cut we need all the support we can get, and language is the key.

Interesting Links:

The original article by Olivia Patterson:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/why-its-time-for-galleries-to-dump-the-jargon-8480622.html?origin=internalSearch

‘End Oil Sponsorship of the Arts’: http://www.artnotoil.org.uk/about

And ‘Liberate Tate’: http://liberatetate.wordpress.com/

War artist Xavier Pick: http://www.xavierpick.co.uk/

Another interesting contemporary war artist Derek Eland: http://derekeland.com/

Tracey Emin’s charity work: http://www.looktothestars.org/celebrity/tracey-emin

Tracey Emin’s website: http://www.traceyeminstudio.com/

 

 

White: Art History's Dirty Little Secret

White: Art History’s Dirty Little Secret

Inspired by ‘A History of the World in Three Colours: Blue’ BBC4 documentary by Dr James Fox

White is usually associated with innocence, but behind the perfect façade hides a dark history of corruption and control.

Dr James Fox begins his exploration of white with an act of vandalism that took place at the British Museum in 1938. The Elgin Marbles, an extremely important survivor of the ancient world were being cleaned. Not just cleaned, but stripped of their colour, and without the authorisation of the museum’s board of directors. An influential art dealer, Joseph Devine, had recently funded a new exhibition space for the marbles. He admired them greatly, except for the fact that they displayed residues of colour, and he thought they should be white. So he bribed the staff preparing the marbles for display to strip them bare. Fortunately they were caught before they could vandalise them all, but their efforts can still be seen to this day. So why was Devine so adamant that these sculptures should be white? That responsibility lies with J.J. Winkleman.

Born in 18^th Century rural Germany, J.J. Winkleman was the son of a cobbler. But he had bigger dreams and at the age of 30 headed off to start a new life in Dresden. One day he stumbled across a store room full of ancient white statues; he fell instantly in love, and spent years searching for more statues and writing essays in praise of them. In 1755 whilst employed as the ‘Keeper of Antiquities’ at the Vatican he found the most perfect example of ancient sculpture: Apollo Belvedere (300BCE). In his eyes this statue was the embodiment of perfection, and it was pure white. For Winkleman white represented beauty, health, simplicity and reason, and he believed that if society could take on these ideas it would be more successful. The impassioned writings of Winkleman led to the veneration of antiquity that continues today. Look around your city centre and you will see buildings built in the classical style, with pillars and porticos, and largely they are white. Of course what Winkleman didn’t know and we now do is that Roman sculpture and buildings used to be painted in bright colours; most had just faded by the time he got round to seeing them. Our respect of white antiquity is based on a myth dreamt up by one man – quite a legacy.

An avid disciple of JJ Winkleman was Josiah Wedgewood – the ultimate enlightenment man. Wedgewood had a dream too – every person could have a piece of antiquity in their home by owning a piece of his classical style white coloured pottery. English pottery in the 18^th century was coarse and cumbersome in earthy colours - bad taste thought Wedgewood. He wanted to push his idea of good taste into the public consciousness until they agreed. But he had one problem – only the Chinese could create a white glaze. It took Wedgewood a staggering 5000 attempts to get the perfect white glaze, but in 1761 he succeeded and his Queen’s Ware with its neo-classical styling was the first white pottery in Europe.

During the enlightenment period white had been used to unify people, offering a shared culture and taste. In the 19^th Century that idea was turned on its head by one man, a rich American artist called Whistler. Upon his arrival in England in 1851, Whistler was horrified by the Victorians’ love of fantasy and mythology: a theme that was prevalent in the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites. Whistler wanted to set himself apart from this sentimentalism and he used the colour white to achieve this. A popular novel of the time, The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, was the catalyst for his exhibition of paintings presenting women in white dresses. The Victorians gamely visited the show expecting to see their realised image of their fantasy woman in white, but what they found confused them. Each painting was entitled Symphony in White, they weren’t about a woman, the subject was white itself. Whistler had used white to mock the public: only his close circle of friends understood the meaning of the paintings; white became the colour of elitism. In 1883 Whistler took his white obsession further: his white paintings of Venice were displayed in a white room, in white frames, and he even made the gallery attendant wear white. Some argue that Whistler pioneered the ‘white cube’ gallery space. The exhibition was entitled A Masterpiece of Mischief, but what Whistler had created wasn’t fun at all; it was cold, sterile and unwelcoming.

 

This fashion for impenetrable art was continued into the 20^th Century, championed by Marcel Duchamp and his infamous Fountain of 1917. In this documentary Dr James Fox comments that when most art critics assess Fountain, they always seem to miss one key aspect of the piece: its whiteness. The fact that the upside down urinal is white is central to understanding Duchamp’s motives. It is supposed to remind us of the marble busts of antiquity, of Wedgewood’s porcelain, and it reminds us to mock them. Marcel Duchamp wanted us to question our concept of ‘good taste’ that has been imposed upon us for centuries. What Duchamp didn’t know was how fighting imposed ideology would be vital in the years to come.

 

Le Corbusier was a Swiss-born architect; in 1925 he wrote the purist manifesto Towards a New Architecture. The manifesto contained within it the blueprints for a new world and central to Corbusier’s plan was the whitewashing of architecture. He called it the ‘Law of Ripolin’: "Every citizen is required to replace his hangings, his damasks, his wall-papers, his stencils, with a plain coat of white Ripolin. His home is made clean". Le Corbusier believed that by eradicating all forms of decoration and reminders of the past the citizens would achieve "inner cleanness". Many of Le Corbusier’s designs were carried out, mainly apartment blocks and civic buildings. It came as no surprise that in 1934 Mussolini invited Le Corbusier to Rome to talk about this ‘new architecture’. Mussolini wanted to create a new Roman empire, to rip down the ancient monuments and start afresh; he took Le Corbusier’s ideas, but never employed him, wanted to take the credit for himself. Mussolini didn’t rip down the ancient monuments, but he did create a new city, filled with imposing white stone buildings called Esposizione Universale Roma (EUR). In the spirit of his predecessors, Mussolini also had a ginormous white marble obelisk erected. It was made form a single block of pure Carrera marble – the best in the world – and was transported the old-fashioned way: pulled by hundreds of donkeys on rolling logs. The power trip continued as Mussolini constructed ‘The Stadium of the Marbles’, a sporting arena surrounded by marble statues of athletes, each one representing an Italian town, each one white. Hitler may have pioneered the obsession with the perfect Aryan race, but Mussolini was quick on the uptake; his marble statues represented an Italy united in perfection, united in fascism, united in racism, with no room for the individual.

 

Once the colour white represented the quest to enlighten, inspire and improve, but the modern world converted it into a tool to divide, exclude and control. Dr Fox concludes that: “we still think of white as a clean, blank canvas, but it is forever tainted by our impurities.” We have all been complicit in the whitewashing of art history.

 

The Elgin Marbles:     http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/articles/w/what_are_the_elgin_marbles.aspx

 

Apollo Belvedere:

http://digitalcollections.ucsc.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/p265101coll30/id/3384/rec/2

 

Symphony in White no. 3 by Whistler: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Whistler_James_Symphony_in_White_No_3_1866.jpg

 

Fountain by Marcel Duchamp: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-fountain-t07573

 

Le Corbusier:  http://www.postmedia.net/08/papadimitriou.htm

 

 http://www.ncpe.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Klinkhamer_OffprintPERvol4.pdf

 

Mussolini and EUR:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EUR,_Rome

 

Blue: To Infinity and Beyond

Inspired by ‘A History of the World in Three Colours: Blue’ BBC4 documentary by Dr James Fox

Since the dawn of mankind, we have looked out to the distant horizon or up into the sky and wondered what is out there. Blue is the colour that embodies our insatiable curiosity for the unknown.

Venice: 1000BC, a boat arrived at the port with a precious cargo of the strangest object the Venetians had seen: a bright blue rock. Arabs brought this blue rock, Lapis Lazuli, from a distant land that is now Afghanistan. They traded it for gold and returned home, leaving the Italians to perfect a method of turning the incredibly hard rock into pure blue pigment for paint. In his documentary Dr James Fox visits a contemporary Italian artist who describes this process of refinement “a testament to the importance of art that they worked so hard to make it as beautiful as possible”. The Italians called the colour ‘Ultramarine’ which means ‘from beyond the sea’, from a land unknown.

Ultramarine was used in moderation by monks to decorate illuminated manuscripts, but in 1303 Giotto went against moderation when he decorated the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. He painted the entire ceiling a deep blue and dotted it with golden stars and saints. Giotto represented heaven in blue and it quickly came to represent the colour of the unknown paradise; he had rendered the colour sacred. From then on the church tried to restrict the use of the colour blue. Only the Virgin Mary was allowed to be depicted wearing it. The church’s control of Lapis Lazuli inflated its price until it became more expensive than the gold the Arabs had traded it for.

The church succeeded in its control of the use of ultramarine until 1523 when Titian smeared it all over the canvas of Bacchus and Ariadne. No longer just for the Virgin Mary, he clothed a pagan Greek goddess in it, and even an anonymous female reveller! The church was outraged. Three years later Titian struck again, this time with a painting which sees St Peter take the centre stage draped in a splendid blue robe, whilst the Virgin Mary is pushed to the side with only a scrap of blue cloth about her waist. Pesaro Madonna was blasphemy in paint in the eyes of the church, but the damage was already done; Titian had liberated blue, it became the colour of freedom.

During the Romantic era of the 18^th Century blue took on another guise, due to the publishing of a book by Novalis called Heinrich von Ofterdingen. The eponymous young hero becomes obsessed with the search for a blue flower, yet his search takes place only in his mind. The book may have been largely forgotten, but at the time was highly influential in transforming blue into the embodiment of the unattainable.

The 18^th Century also gave birth to the saying ‘blue devils’ meaning a bout of depression and delirium. In the early 20^th Century ‘blue devils’ inspired the naming of the ‘Blues’ style of music, it’s why when we’re down we say we’ve ‘got the blues’. Furthermore, the 20^th Century saw the instigation of a psychological analysis of the link between blue and depression. One of the first to explore this connection was famous psychiatrist Carl Jung with his analysis of Pablo Picasso. After the suicide of his best friend, Picasso spent three years repeatedly painting about the tragedy, using a palette almost entirely of blue. Jung hypothesised that Picasso was expressing his deepest emotions through the medium of blue because it was the colour of death in Ancient Egypt, of hell and of the unknown. This act of catharsis led to the group of paintings we call Picasso’s ‘Blue Period’. As his emotional wounds began to heal, Picasso gradually reintroduced other colours into his paintings.  
The Cote d’Azure in the1940s, amidst the glamour and excess of Nice one young man looked up at the blue sky and dreamed of escape. His name was Yves Klein. After many varied career attempts, Klein decided to be an artist. Ever since his childhood he had been obsessed with blue, for him it symbolised ‘the void’: deep seas, infinite skies and spirituality. Klein believed that monochrome could be an "open window to freedom, as the possibility of being immersed in the immeasurable existence of colour." He took his obsession further when he enlisted a chemical technician called Edouard Adam to engineer the purest blue possible, which he achieved by mixing a new colourless medium with the ultramarine pigment. He named this substance International Klein Blue (IKB), and proceeded to paint objects and whole canvases in this single, penetrating hue. Klein experimented with performance art and in one infamous trick photograph he appears to leap out of a window. Klein died tragically young; in life he was constantly trying to escape; in death he was finally free.

It was from an unexpected source that our concept of blue finally changed. In 1967 the Apollo 8 space mission sent a group of astronauts to orbit the moon. Once in orbit they were instructed to take photographs of the moon’s surface. Upon returning from the dark side of the moon one man took a photograph of something never seen by human eyes before: our blue planet Earth. Dr James Fox explains how this photograph, ‘Earth Rise’, circulated around the globe and lead us to realise the irony of it all: “Blue was the colour of the great beyond, the unknown, but when we finally breached that horizon, we found that blue was the colour of home.”

Related links:

A History of Art in Three Colours website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01l9mf

Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel: http://www.cappelladegliscrovegni.it/index.php/en/the-scrovegni-s-chapel/history-of-scrovegni-s-chapel

Titian’s Pesaro Madonna: http://www.italianrenaissance.org/titian-pesaro-madonna/

Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/titian-bacchus-and-ariadne

Carl Jung’s 1932 article on Picasso: http://web.org.uk/picasso/jung_article.html

About Novalis: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/novalis.htm

Yves Klein biography: http://www.theartstory.org/artist-klein-yves.htm

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gold and Society

Response inspired by ‘The History of Art in Three Colours: Gold’ BBC4 documentary by Dr James Fox

Gold gives us status, and not just in the sense of a material social standing. Gold will always lead us to the fundamental ideology of an era, for gold is always used to represent what is most important to a society. An example of this is the smattering of gold related sayings there are in our language: ‘gold standard’, ‘golden rule’, ‘golden age’, all of which reinforce the idea of gold representing the best, the most important, and the marker that everything else can be measured by.

Gold was first used by ancient civilisations to depict the sun. The sun was seen as a mystical object appearing and disappearing on a constant cycle. Awe-struck by its presence, ancient societies worshipped the ‘sun-god’ and the elder tribe members used golden representations to teach the others of the sun’s importance.

Sun worship was a key element of Egyptian culture in 1400 BCE when Tutankhamen was Pharaoh. Even more important to him than life was the afterlife. Leaving nothing to chance, Tutankhamen was encased in gold to journey to other side, hoping it would bring him eternal life. His tomb was discovered in 1922 by archaeologist Howard Carter. Tutankhamen’s treasures were not intended to be seen by mortal eyes, his status mattered only to the Gods.

In 300CE Constantin, the emperor of Rome converted to Christianity, eschewing polytheism for the worship one god. Christianity was a religion for the everyman, including the poor and as such rejected the use of gold to worship their god. It was centuries later that gold began to be used to represent Jesus, more particularly the halo surrounding his head. This gold was not depicting an object, but something immaterial – the light of God. In his documentary Dr Fox visits a contemporary artist making Christian iconography. He explained why gold has been used through the ages to depict the light of God: “Through reflection of light on the gold, God is interacting with the painting and then with us because he is the light, he is dynamic”. These paintings were intended to be viewed up close by candle light, the glow would have been so blinding it would have seemed other-worldly. The Basilica San Vitale in Italy is the most over the top example of gold being used in Christian art. The interior of the building is encrusted with gold faced glass mosaic tiles, which catch the light and appear to shine.

By the time of the Renaissance, gold was being used not to show the purity of God, but the power of kings. Florence became the centre of the gold-smithing world, and the kings and queens of Europe were hooked on the jewels produced there; none more so than ‘Augustus the Strong’ of Saxony. The Golden Rider in Dresden is a colossal horse mounted statue of himself, in gold, mimicking the Roman emperors of old.  So obsessed with gold was Augustus that he kidnapped a young alchemist who claimed he could turn base metals into the desired material. Imprisoned for a decade, the alchemist worked tirelessly to produce gold, but was unsuccessful and eventually executed.

However, in 1850 the miracle seemed to have happened. George Elkington of Birmingham invented a machine which would change the status of gold forever; he could turn any object into gold. He called his process ‘Electro-plating’. Suddenly anyone could afford a piece of mass-produced gold; replicas of ancient ceremonial objects were churned out in their thousands losing all their original meaning. All society cared about now was ownership, showing off their bit of ‘bling’, gold was now longer a rare sacred material.

During the early 20^th Century an old romantic tried to reverse the onslaught of mass-production and make gold sacred again. His name was Gustav Klimt. Glittering with gold leaf and paint, Klimt’s painting ‘The Kiss’ shocked the art world with its avant-garde composition, but the true meaning behind this image was the oldest ideal. Klimt used gold to represent the most sacred thing we have: love. But his dream could never truly work, the industrial revolution had changed us forever, we all loved ‘The Kiss’ too much and had to have a piece of it. Klimt’s master piece has been reproduced so often and onto the cheapest of objects, its original meaning has been almost entirely dissolved.

But what does gold mean to us today? As always gold represents society’s foremost desire, and in the 21^st Century that is money. The boom in the ‘Cash for Gold’ market typifies this ideal; we are melting down any gold we can get our hands on for its monetary worth. That money buys us the latest electronic gadgets so we can be like everyone else and keep the status quo.

Related links:

A History of Art in Three Colours website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01l9mf

About Tutankhamen: http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/article_index/t/tutankhamun,_king_of_egypt_13.aspx

Basilica San Vitale: http://www.sacred-destinations.com/italy/ravenna-san-vitale

Gustav Klimt article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17689920