A thought from the train

What is it about conceptual art that so winds me up? It's almost irrational. Perhaps it is because I do not have the necessary kind of imagination. When I see an everyday object in a gallery, I see an everyday object. I don't see beyond that. It does not speak to me.

These are ideas made flesh, which could easily be a description of all art however these are ideas seemingly without the aesthetic considerations that have underpinned art through the centuries. The aesthetic has been burned away, sacrificed at the alter of ideology, forsaken for the desire to be shocking. In being refined so, conceptual art has lost the appearance of skilled creation. It has been refined so that its language has become so etheric as to be near invisible. 

For those uneducated in, or simply unaware of this language, it can easily be interpreted as an inside joke, part of a clique to which you are not invited. Of all the art forms to exist, it surely must be the most exclusionary. 

It becomes an elitist practice, made by a small group of people for a small group of people. For the majority it can therefore reinforce the idea that art, all art, is only for the elite – an idea only further bolstered when conceptual art is almost the only contemporary art to, somewhat ironically, be given mass media exposure.

It could be argued that its prominence is in part due to a mess-media built on, and hungry for, short term sensationalism, scandal and shock. Few art forms can so readily feed that maw.

A tale of sound and fury

A few days ago, I walked out of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art so angry I could hardly speak – vibrating, nostrils flaring, teeth locked, brows knitted – angry enough to step out in front of, and face down, a speeding car on the pedestrian crossing outside. I left with a desire to never ever return to the gallery. I left hating art.

The SNGMO's current exhibition, From Death to Death and Other Small Tales features pieces from the gallery's collection that have been mixed together with a Greek billionaire's private collection, to "create a new dynamic context for both collections." The show intends to "discover the diverse ways in which 20th and 21st century artists have approached the subject of the body."

There are a lot of big names on show here, enough to make the show almost a who's who of the last hundred years of contemporary arts. In this sense, it is an impressive exhibition to visit in my home town, doubly so that it is free. Clearly, I should be thankful to have the opportunity to be allowed to see such stellar artworks, plucked from the firmament and brought down to lowly little Edinburgh. Sadly, I am not thankful.

The exhibition is, for the most part, a cold dead thing – the title, of course, should have been a clue. It is one long, insipid and uninspired in-joke, with a few good pieces that serve only to highlight the paucity of talent on display elsewhere. Works that are so puerile as to become utterly vacuous, rub shoulders with pieces dense and unfeeling enough, that the bodies which inspired them could only have been corpses. It is an unhappy, uninspired and uninspiring view of the world and ourselves. While it might seek to find something universal in our bodies, it instead finds only darkness and self-obsession.

Marcel Duchamp's 'Fountain', 1917

I'm almost embarrassed to admit that it only took us just over 30 minutes to take in the whole exhibition, including a return to linger over five small and beautiful Francesca Woodman photographic prints. I have never walked around the gallery faster. Dust flew in my wake. I may never have seen most of these pieces before, however I have seen similar from the same shallow end of the art pool, where shock and spectacle have become the all-encompassing point. I've seen the like in modern and contemporary galleries across the country. Finding Marcel Duchamp's 'Fountain' a little past the half way mark in the exhibition made for the ironic centre to the exhibition: an artwork whose sole merit is the in-joke, elevated to high art: the clear forefather of much of the work on show here.

Witness the found objects, exhibiting as much worth as a pair of discarded old shoes in a gutter, such as Joseph Beuys' 'Felt Suit' (1970); the ugly forms typified in twenty embarrassingly poor Tracey Emin scribbles; Picasso's 'Nu Assis' (1969) that comes across as the barrel-scraping of a dirty old man; the numerous video art pieces – a medium that is singularly hard to engage with – and a whole room covered in a black wallpaper, patterned with toilet wall cock 'n' balls and lady's spread legs. The viewer is not so much left pondering their body and its time on earth, so much as the more prominent question of why is much of this called art? There is little creativity on show, while it is hard to imagine the artists having taken anything even close to a delight in the making of their work. Almost all that is on offer is cruel irony, a sneer from on high. If I wanted to be this depressed, I'd stay in bed with the curtains closed and have our endless winter rewound and started again.

In short, the exhibition left me cold, much as last year's Sculpture Show did. Like that show, this features work conforming to the same narrow view of the world of art. Also like that show, this one is going to run for many, many months. Yet, where the Sculpture Show lasted for six months, this one runs for nine. It is in considering this final aspect that I became so angry.

I accept that there is a whole world of art out there that says nothing to me, does nothing for me and is made without any heart. I do not like it, yet I accept that it exists and that it will be shown and that there must be, somewhere, people who take something from it. I even admire the gallery for trying something different in their curation of these exhibitions.

What I find unacceptable is that the SNGMO has been given over to this narrow viewpoint for such breathtakingly long periods of time. In the past two years, these exhibitions have taken over the entire gallery for fifteen months. It is astoundingly arrogant: like it or lump it is the message. In the past, where one could visit parts of the permanent collection in the upper galleries, now one has no choice but to return to these exhibitions, or be deprived of museum level modern art for almost two thirds of the year.

I have been visiting the gallery for around twenty years. Today it feels like the gallery and collection that I have loved and thoroughly enjoyed for all that time has been changed into something that is no longer for me. Of course, I could be wrong. Perhaps, simply, my view of art is hopelessly outdated and I am lost in an ancient back water in this post modern world. Or perhaps, even more simply, I just don't like art any more.

It's all the rage

This week, Megan and I took a trip through England, visiting many big public galleries. In London we visited the Tate Modern, the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery; in Birmingham the Ikon Gallery and the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery; in Manchester the Manchester Art Gallery. I learned that I have almost no affinity whatsoever for conceptual art and that, if I am to believe what I saw in some of these galleries, I am only interested in art that was made before 1950. Does this not make me seem rather like a philistine? It certainly made me feel like one and that was most unwelcome.

I have documented here my problem with conceptual art several times, going as far as to label it Fashion Art. I am now, frankly, tired of this it. I'm tired of seeing it in all the major modern galleries, I'm tired of talking about it with every artist I know or meet, I'm tired of getting angry about it and, most of all, I'm tired of thinking about it. And even with all of that, I still can't stop myself from once more rehashing my experiences of it.

Having seen so much of it in the past week, at the Tate Modern and Ikon Gallery, I feel like an idiot for not understanding it, for not caring one jot about it and for thinking that it is simply cannot be art. How can I call my self an artist and yet be so completely at odds with what seems to be the major art movement of my time? When I read "As the title suggests, Steel Zinc Plain represents a territory or a space as much as an object. By placing it on the floor rather than on a plinth and allowing it to be walked across, Andre alters the viewer’s relationship to the work of art" why do I keep shaking my head and wondering what I am missing, before feeling stupid and excluded? If I had been alive in the nineteenth century, would I have shunned those appalling new pieces by the so-called Impressionists, with all of their mess and unlife-like appearance?

Conceptual art depresses me. It depresses me because it is omnipresent, seemingly to the exclusion of every other contemporary art form. I want to see work invested with feeling, that has been wrought by artists using the hand, eye and heart, rather than this stuff of sensation and empty questions. Alternately, as an artist I could simply be jealous that conceptual artists appear to be swimming in the depths of accolades and money, while the sole of my foot is barely even wet.

I ought to take a lesson from this and totally avoid conceptual art in future. This, however, would appear to be no easy task at a time when there seems to be almost no other form of contemporary art on display in public galleries, almost as if each and every curator is dancing to the beat of one drummer, following in the wake of the unclothed emperor.

In many of our public galleries, we see vast spaces taken up with a small number of thin-seeming conceptual pieces, while enormous collections are held in storage, away from the public's eye. It seems wrongheaded, especially when one considers how disengaged audiences seem to be with conceptual art, compared to more traditional forms. At the Tate Modern viewers drifted through the spaces, never seemingly stopping for long, whereas in the National Gallery some paintings held constant and barely-moving crowds in front of them like magnets.

If we are to believe these admittedly-jaundiced memories, then something is clearly amiss. It would seem that many of those in charge of the public's art purse are purchasing and showing work that the public does not particularly care for.

Recently, Edinburgh's Fruitmarket Gallery held an Anna Barriball exhibition, that featured around twenty works lost in the brilliant white space of this mid-sized venue. On top of adding to the gallery's reputation for hosting unpopular and unlikeable art, it was shockingly empty when compared to the nearby Royal Scottish Academy. That building was playing host to the annual exhibitions of Visual Arts Scotland, the Scottish Society of Artists and the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour, all at once. Here was an exhibition showing a cross-section of contemporary art; a vibrant, lively and attractive show, where walls had to be jammed full of paintings and which ran for only a month.

One of the many empty spaces in Sarah Browne's
How To Use Fool's Gold in Birmingham's Ikon Gallery.

Last week in the Ikon Gallery, another attractive mid-sized space, Sarah Brown's exhibition How To Use Fool's Gold took up one whole floor. This time less than ten pieces failed to fill the space. There seemed little unity in the work and if there was a vision for the exhibition it was far from evident. Once again an exhibition of contemporary work in a modern gallery lacked any emotion and had few visitors.

When most of the money and public gallery space in contemporary art is stuck to what appears to be vacuous gimmickry, it is not just the majority of artists who suffer, but the viewing public too. The artists starve or give up to take a soul-destroying job; the public turn away from art thinking they do not like it and live an unenriched life of corporate entertainment and large-screen televisions. We can surmise that, just as with our financial world where the 1% have all of the riches, so too the art establishment only notices the fashionable 1% (some of whom it would appear are even part of the financial 1%). It is a sad state of affairs.

The "Fighting Temeraire" Tugged to her
Last Berth to be Broken up – William Turner, 1839

Happily, our England trip was not totally consumed by conceptual upset – we also got to see justly famous artworks of beauty and emotion. At the National Gallery we saw several rooms of great Impressionist works, including Degas' Combing the Hair, as well as a wall of van Goghs and Turner's stunning Fighting Temeraire. Here Megan fell for even older pieces: Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors and Jan van Wyck's Arnolfini Portrait. Up north we particularly enjoyed two Modiglianis, with one in Birmingham and one in Manchester.

Our last stop at Manchester Art Gallery, turned out to be an unexpected highlight. With an impressive, well kept and well laid-out collection, covering an almost 700 year span, it packs an impressive punch for a gallery of its size. Its rooms of Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian art (including John William Waterhouse's Hylas and the Nymphs and Charles Mengin's Sappho) were a particularly treat, which was a genuine surprise given my previous lack of interest in work of that type.

While much of this work was often beautiful and even at times emotional, little of the contemporary work on show was either. I am an artist, who by very definition makes contemporary work, work that is, to me, both emotional and beautiful. Over the past few years I've met plenty other artists who are similarly engaged. I believe that this kind of work, made using the hand, the eye and the heart, would be well received by the viewing public, if only they knew of its existence.

Today I am part of the unfashionable 99% of artists. Being unfashionable does not upset me, neither does being one of the masses. What does upset me is the skewed perception of contemporary art that our public galleries foster. It think it is time for the 99% to get their turn. Who's with me?

Cash rules everying around me

On first appearances, the world of art and the world of banking would seem to have few similarities. However, on pondering the current show at the Fruitmarket Gallery, it occurred to me that there was at least one.

Showing until April 9th, Anna Barriball's exhibition 'Exhibition' fills both floors of the gallery. Walking in with no foreknowledge, we were at first perplexed and then, finally, made somewhat angry by what we saw. Two dimensional objects, such as a five pound note, coloured in with ink; pencil rubbings made of doors and windows; rolls of graphite or paint-covered paper placed against the walls; found photos spotted with ink; a whole wall of stencil-patterning.

Here is art that is made using techniques common to primary education, masquerading as interdisciplinary work where "drawings are also sculptures, sculptures are drawings". These are basic techniques being exhibited as elitist art and I was utterly disengaged by them.

Without reading about the work, I saw nothing here but surface; a gallery of superficial 'art'. After reading the exhibition guide, which uses several hundred words to say almost nothing, I felt no more disposed to the work. More to the point, the long-winded descriptions of the pieces in fact angered me.

Anna Barriball, Untitled, 2009.
Pencil on Paper, 218 x 134 cm.
Private Collection.

"Much of the large-scale work in this exhibition Barriball makes through a process similar to taking a rubbing of an object: pressing with pencil or brush onto paper attached to different surfaces, directly transferring the texture of a window, wall, shutters or door onto paper. The body of dense markings possesses solidity, weight and mass despite the weightlessness of materials like paper and graphite. The direct transfer of surface texture and folds and creases produced through flattening volumetric elements creates a very close representation, a fusion of abstraction and figuration."

Of the ten paragraphs in the guide, of which this is one of the shorter ones, there is little more explanation of the work than this. Barriball's techniques are laid bare in rather grand eloquent terms, that try to disguise what could be seen as rather infantile mark making processes. If anything, rather than serve as an intermediary, an explanation that helps the views to enter the work, the guide slams the door in our faces. Like the art, it simply says that if you do not know and use the word 'liminal', you have no place here.

This exhibition is a retrospective and one where the majority of the pieces are called 'untitled'. There seems to be almost no evidence of artistic development, over the ten year period covered. Looking at the work, and the overblown claims made against it, it all seems like an inside joke that is trying really hard to be clever. This is exclusive and arrogant work and there is nothing here for anyone beyond the elite of the art world.

A few weeks ago, I commented on more conceptual art that is currently being exhibited in Edinburgh. In particular, I was unimpressed by Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawing #1136, a large mural concept that has been licensed to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art for eleven months (does anyone know if LeWitt works with Ikea?). At that time, a phrase popped into my head, which I kept to myself. That phrase, 'fashion art', returned to my head after seeing Barriball's work.

Fashion as we understand it in terms of clothes, is a superficial world. There is nothing beyond what you see on the surface. As a label, Fashion Art could be thrown at any art form, however this morning I want to throw it at Conceptual Art, because for me it seems the closest fit. When a piece of art looks bizarre or ugly to the majority, when it makes no impression on us, does not move us, when even the artist seems to have no explanation for it, who would call it anything but Fashion Art? There is no depth here, no meaning. It is not holding up a mirror to life.

The more I am exposed to the world of Fashion Art, the more come to I dislike it. Who is this work made for and who is buying it? It feels like a giant house of cards, waiting for the slightest wind to knock it over, when we shall see the emperor's new clothes for what they are.

Another place we may well see at least the first part of that horribly mixed metaphor is in our banking system. Yet it is not the house of cards in banking that first drew me to writing this piece. The similarity I see in banking and art is in the people who populate it. In both worlds, the mass of those working there are simply doing what they can do to get by. The motivations between the two groups may well be very different, but we all work and eat and live in the world. However, it is at the top of the ladder than I see the biggest similarity.

On both sides are groups of people, whose importance and renumeration are impossible to justify. It is hard to see why they are in the positions they are in. To many, it appears they have reached their positions by either bluffing their way to the top, or having known the right people and said the right things.

In both practices, the existence of these people bring their entire worlds into disrepute. They grab all of the headlines, as well as farcical sums of money, while at the same time having almost no connection to those that make up the majority of their worlds. It hardly seems to be a balanced system.

For some time, top artists have been thought by the masses to be in this unjustifiable position. Only lately have top bankers been recognised as being similarly located. At this time, following a seemingly endless cycle of banking crises, many are questioning why we have such 'top bankers'. In the world or art, where fewer and fewer artists are able to make ends meet, I think we need to ask a similar question.

Stop in the mighty river

Art is such an ambiguous word that it can be open to almost any interpretation. Every artist has their own take on what it means, likewise curators and viewers have their own ideas and all of these ideas, on everyone's part, are likely to be altered by context. This morning, for example, when reading an article about art I realised that I had entertained a thought that was diametrically opposed to one I had earlier in the week. Less than an hour later, those diametric views have been forgotten and I find that I am unconcerned by their occurrence or loss.

Untitled, Arrangement with Black
William Johnstone, ink brush drawing, c. 1975

The idea that everyone has a role to play in defining art is very close to the subject of the current exhibition at the Talbot Rice Gallery. Beholder, which runs until February 18th, focuses on different people's perceptions of beauty in art and therefore comprises a very mixed show. It was refreshing to see such a variety of work in one place, even if personally there was no particular piece that represented beauty to me. Of course, in many ways that is the point.

Beauty for me, however, is a hard thing to grasp in the grey depths of winter and so it was consequently something of a surprise to find it lurking in the Scottish Gallery's William Johnstone retrospective. Until walking through their doors a few days ago, I had no idea that there was a local abstract expressionist contemporaneous to the big names of the field. (This probably says more about me than it does about the world of Scottish art.) There are some powerful pieces in the show, however it was in some of the stark ink on paper works that I really saw something special.

The most lingering effect of the show has been to give me the feeling of a connection to the past. Hitherto, I had been under the uninformed impression that abstract art did not have a local history, that it had taken place mostly within a small group of New York-based artists. I therefore saw myself painting in something of a rootless, borrowed environment. While seeing Johnstone's work means that I am still clearly not at the cutting edge of art, it also means that I am no longer quite so adrift.

Painting by Doug Randall

Another person whose art I encountered this week and who is similarly far from the cutting edge is Doug Randall. Doug is an impressionist painter from Fayetteville, Arkansas and a friend of Megan Chapman. This week Megan and I had our own late Christmas day and Megan gave me a small painting by Doug as my gift. It is one of my favourite pieces from all that I have seen in the past few weeks.

In a less personal way, both Megan and I were also very drawn to four textile pieces by Phoebe Anna Traquair, so much so that we visited them twice. As part of the permanent collection at the Scottish National Gallery, these works from the end of the nineteenth century are located in the furthest and darkest part of the gallery. Even in their dim corridor, they sparkle with richly-coloured life, made with an assured, painstaking hand.

These recent experiences have given rise in me to a different way of thinking about art. Both my work and Doug's have their genesis in eras before our births, yet we are by a very correct definition contemporary artists. Thinking about this and my recently-discovered local history, I began to see art as something like a mighty river, yet like a river whose delta is often springing new separate rivers, all flowing ever onwards.

The Progress of a Soul
Phoebe Anna Traquair, thread on linen 1895-1903

With this in mind, I thought further about Traquair's pieces, which do not appear to be from a particular period. In photos, she is clearly a Victorian lady (even if she acted little like that imagined stereotype). This idea of her seemed almost irreconcilable with her work and it gave rise to a further thought; that who we are as artists is of far less importance, within that great river, than what we make. We do not enter the river, only our art does. Art is all that is important.

The river of art, today, seems less about beauty than ever before. Whilst the Beholder show demonstrated that beauty can be found in many disparate art forms, the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art's Sculpture Show (that Megan and I visited last week), gave strong clues that beauty is no longer such an important element in art. Even less palatable than this revelation though, was a further one which suggests that in the world of art, the art itself seems to be losing its importance.

In one of the only rooms not to be currently housing the Sculpture Show, is Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawing #1136. The gallery notes that "drawings such as these exist as a set of instructions that are then carried out by a team at the Gallery who make the drawing themselves…"

The suggestion that the artist does not need to make their own art is unwelcome enough on its own, however that the artist need not even go near their work is worse still. More dammingly, the statement goes on to note that the piece, which is painted each time directly onto a gallery wall, will later be painted over. We can therefore be delivered into the unhappy conclusion that the actual piece of art is less important than the idea behind it. In many ways this interpretation of what art is for is the most challenging and potentially disastrous of all. When the idea becomes more important than the art, can we still actually call it art?

Back in that immense river, as the delta spreads, the main channel grows slower and weaker. Indeed, there are so many other channels now, that for all we know maybe what we once saw as the main one will soon wash up in a mud bank. Or maybe the time for such a simplistic vision has passed. It is an entertaining thought.

In the mean time, I'm going to keep on contributing to one of the less well-regarded channels. It may not be a fashionable one, but for me it is art.