Art History Today

Goodbye Robert Hughes

Just my own very modest tribute to the art critic’s critic, Robert Hughes who has sadly died at the age of 74.

Why I loved RH.

His 70s series, Shock of the New, has to be the best TV on modern art ever. I showed a clip last term: the one where he’s talking about Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare. It was hugely appreciated by my students; no body else could talk with such insight, and yet clarity about conceptual art. I find it hard to watch art history TV these days, but RH, along with John Berger was compelling viewing.

His non-nonsense, honest attitude, best epitomised in his “New Shock of the New” where he puts an ignorant collector of modern art through the shredder. Though this guy deserved it, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. Hughes’s dry comment on entering this apartment full of modern art is priceless “Oh, what a nice view of the park.” I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve shown this clip in class.

His books. Too many to mention, but one of the best for me was his book on Goya, written after an horrific car accident. The first chapter was called “Driving Into Goya.” A lot of art history writing can feel like wading through treacle, but Hughes had the gift of blending erudition with wit and imagination.

His wit. He described Jean Michel Basquiat as “Jean-Michel Basket Case”. But my favourite putdown was his answer to Barnett Newman who compared his abstract canvas series, Stations of the Cross, to a struggle with Michelangelo. Hughes replied “Hard luck ducky- you lost!”

Shame we’ve lost this irreplaceable critic- but his legacy is vast. I suppose this is the perfect time to read Hughes’s autobiography, which I haven’t got around to yet.

Matthew Collings and 10 Years of Tate Modern

Good programme on BBC4 last night.

Maybe it's not unusual to see Matthew Collings presenting a programme on 10 years of Tate Modern, but I did get the impression that he was slightly bemused by the whole topic; he seemed to have a certain ambivalence about his relationship to those times too. Back in the heady 80s, Collings personified the new enthusiasm of the era that saw Tate Modern opened amidst a helazapoppin atmosphere of champagne orgies and acid house music. Last night's programme saw Tracey Emin reminiscing on multiple bottles of fizz consumed in lift parties, followed by drunken contemplation of the art inaugurating the event. With such abandon, the new avant-garde was launched.

Never off late night arts programmes, especially BBC2's epochal Late Show, Collings extolled the virtues of Hirst, Emin and the enfant terribles of Brit Art. Engaging and effusive, Collings drew the confidence of the art brat pack and the brickbats of those who believed modern art and modern life was rubbish. Undaunted, Collings brought the message via accessible art TV on C4 and books designed to be understood by those unfamiliar with the arcane musings of the contemporary art cognoscenti. Riding the wave of Tate Modern, now liberated from the physical constraints of Tate Millbank, Collings caught the vibe of the time and began to speak directly to the public with the aid of an estuary English that omitted 'ing' from words and pronounced superlatives like wonderful 'wunnerful'.

Then it all went sour. In the noughties, Matthew, or Matt as he preferred to call himself, declared his dissatisfaction with contemporary art and the media circus of the Turner Prize. Instead he turned back to the renaissance and the baroque to sing the praises of Titian, Rubens and Velasquez. In this decade I was looking at more modern art, and thinking about its link to the old masters, so I was fascinated not only with the series, but Matt's turnaround: Matt's Old Masters aired on Channel 4 in 2003 followed by a book of the same name. MOM saw Collings take a Kenneth Clark travelogue approach: now emoting in front of Rubens's paintings in Antwerp; next, cruising on the Grand Canal whilst making connections between Titian's painterly style and the splashes of artists like Pollock and De Kooning. He still pronounced wonderful 'wunnerful though, but it didn't bother me- I was intrigued by this mix of blokey classlessness and Clarkean erudition.

Colling's reservations about the art he had previously praised to the skies was echoed by a number of modern art dissenters, most notably Robert Hughes who produced a memorable T.V. revisionist essay, New Shock of the New in which Hughes- recovering from a dreadful car accident- manoeuvred himself with walking stick around Damien Hirst's art whilst almost prodding it with the disdain of a man encountering dog shit on his mid-day stroll. Hughes's deep discontent with modern art was emphasised by the production of an original biography of Goya; again, a modern art pundit had turned back to the old masters in disgust. Something of that same mood came through in last night's programme when Collings, far from the dressed-up Tate image of the noughties, strolled round galleries with shirt out, collar wide open, and an air of having just come out of the pub. Gone was the breathless enthusiasm of old; in its place was a quiet resignation brought on by years of looking at this stuff. Walking around what looked like a pile of bright sherbet on the floor of a corporate gallery occupied by faceless robots in suits, Collins seemed ill at ease and not wholly sold on what he saw in front of him.

Perhaps my favourite part of the programme was Colling's interchange with Tate Modern director Sir Nicholas Serota. Sir Nic – another Collings demotic touch- spoke of the inconvenience of storing modern art at Tate Millbank - now Tate Britain. In the bad old days, the public got to see only a fraction of modern art, said Sir Nic in aggrieved tones. It still rankles with him that modern art took decades to be accepted in this country due to snobbery and museum politics. One of the paintings in this tip of the iceberg category would have been Matisse's Snail which Collings described as "charmingly quaint". Still, you had the feeling that Collings was even less happy with the art that had sidelined Matisse and his "quaint" contemporaries at Tate Modern.  

I know a few experts in modern art, and to them the attitude of Hughes and Collings is incomprehensible. One told me that he saw Hughes's rant as completely unjustified- the curmudgeonly complaining of a grumpy old art critic. They are more forgiving of Collings, perhaps because his disquiet with modern art has taken a less fractious tone than Hughes. I'm not an expert on modern art; I teach courses on art of all periods, but I'm still a tourist there. I think I can understand why Collings and Hughes got fed up with the plethora of art produced in this decade though. Walking round Tate Modern last autumn, I had the feeling that the excellent and canonical art of Matisse, Picasso, Pollock et al was being swallowed up in the maw of frankly unimaginative crap purchased by those in thrall to the ideology of the new.

After 10 years, Tate Modern's significance and importance has diminished, a point wittily underscored by Collings who started this programme from inside a model of the Tate which was itself inside a museum in Berlin. Could there be a more telling metaphor of where Tate Modern stands after 10 years?  

It's become a work of conceptual art in itself, and the art inside merely incidental.  

   

Disappearing Act

It doesn't have anything to do with the fact that Turner Prize winner Richard Wright is a painter; three other painters have won before. What is significant is Wright's way of disposing of his art- he uses white emulsion to make his walls of gold disappear.

This could be categorised as the "the aesthetics of disappearance", an art that has destruction programmed into it. Why is this important today? For Wright, the world is full of "stuff", rather like the bursting cornucopia of digital TV- mostly stuff we can happily do without. The cultural sphere is filling up rapidly and Wright believes less is definitely more. From a strictly art history perspective, Wright's aesthetic can be tied into the current backlash against the 1980s YBA movement, especially Damien Hirst. Hirst, Emin et al are all about producing art objects, largely superfluous, for exhibition in the galleries of Joplin and other avatars of bad taste. Whilst some of this "stuff" is interesting, most of it, like the ephemera of the media industries, seems dispensable.

It's worth asking if Wright's condemnation of over-produced art places him in the camp of those previous modern art commentators like Matthew Collings and Robert Hughes who have become sceptical of postmodern, image-saturated art. Should Wright's effacing art be relocated within a classical tradition that these hitherto boosters of modern art have turned to: Raphael, Rubens, whose art depends upon planning and methodical execution rather than improvisation and novelty, the stock in trade of the YBA crowd. Some critics would happily re-claim Wright for an anti YBA tendency. They would say that Wright's painting marks a return to academic principles: use of the cartoon and preliminary drawings to provide the basic design for the artist to follow. Yes, Wright owes much to traditional fresco painting; but renaissance painters – in some cases- destroyed only their cartoons, not the paintings themselves. But Wright after meticulously planning and painting a wall invariably paints over it, removing it from the sight of his audience, and, let us not forget, himself; Raphael and others were aiming for immortality through their work. Wright's strategy resembles the process of forgetting; deliberately expunging selected parts of memory unlike renaissance art which relied on copying and the recall of ideas and motifs for the maintenance of a tradition.

There's another issue here. I wonder if it is right to say that in destroying his art, Wright removes it from history, let alone art history- not an easy question to answer as we seem to be at the end of history, even living in a post-historical condition. In his book, Art History after Modernism, Hans Belting analysed what he called the "continuity of painting", a space where painting is the site of memories or change rather than part of a movement in art history propelled by progress. Despite attempts to create new types of painting such as neo-expressionism in the 1980s- Schnabel, Basquiat- doubt about concepts such as history and time ensured that such movements were short-lived. It's interesting to consider Wright's painted-over painting in the context of Belting's discussion of post-history and post-modernism. Belting sees art at the end of history split between emancipation from the tradition or replaying "a lost game" in exhibitions and commentary. It strikes me that Wright's gold leaf walls despite their remembrances of art of earlier epochs escape the continuum of painting and the game of repetition and replay; hence it is a mistake to try to claim them as modern re-inventions of renaissance fresco painting, as one critic has. Wright is not the modern equivalent of Giotto or Raphael. Rather, Wright's art has to do with intervals in the artist's and the viewer's life- experiences not reliant on a model of continuous development of art over time, or worse, art that defines its modernity in the context of what has already existed.

That was a sentiment expressed by the cultural historian Walter Benjamin who equated the continually repeated with the condition of hell. Benjamin quoted Kafka from The Trial: the incident where the painter Titorelli produces canvas after canvas, all identical in every respect, from under his bed for the befuddled protagonist K to buy. By destroying his art, Wright ensures his art cannot be sold, or rendered into the status of the commodity. That is what makes Wright's disappearing act significant for the age of late-capitalism
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