2001-12-17 - 2:27 a.m.
THE HERALD (SCOTLAND)ON TATE, STUCKISTS ETC
13 July 2000
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:8A4LXBD9JNE:www.theherald.co.uk/arts/archive/13-7-19101-20-59-37.html+Stuckists&hl=en
An unthinkable concept?
The driving force in British art - the Tate - is coming under increasing scrutiny as it persists in ignoring figurative work, explains JIM McLEAN
FOR between £18,575 and £20,697 a year - yes, they will even pay you - someone with an eye for the next big thing is to be invited to shape the future of British art. The job is with the curatorial team responsible for modern British art, 1860 to 1960, at the Tate. When viewed as an opportunity to work on the self-proclaimed "fore-most collection of British art", the modest salary could easily pale into insignificance.
Then you see it: the sucker punch. It's the Tate.
The job that holds out the promise of "recommending new acquisitions to Tate's director of collections" also guarantees you will be vilified by a growing movement of artists infuriated by the bias towards conceptual art largely dictated by Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota and his Brit Art cronies at the Saatchi gallery. Favoured artists such as Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread, and Tracey Emin are celebrities. The Turner Prize secures almost as many column inches as the Booker.
So go for it, especially if you have an eye for an unmade bed, enjoy leaving condoms trailing across the floor, and know the difference between cutting-edge conceptual art and a confidence trickster. Well, maybe that last one's not essential.
But don't expect an easy ride. The knives are already out for your boss and the role of the Tate, as the engine driving the might of the London-based arts establishment is being questioned at the highest level. Allegations of cronyism and insider dealing abound. At stake is nothing less than the future of art in 21st-century Britain, and the war has become most focused in the power struggle between figurative and conceptual art.
It all started with Marcel Duchamp's Fountain - a urinal displayed as an art object, an audacious icon of twentieth-century modernism. The joke became post-modernism. The pendulum has recently swung towards this with hefty support from the London-based art market and the Tate's mega bucks buying power.
Individual artists and an odd-sounding group called the Stuckists are trying to push it back, or at least balance the market. The Stuckists pro-painting group, co-founded by artists Billy Childish and Charles Thomson, got their name from Childish's former partner, Brit Art idol Tracey Emin, who dismissed him as "stuck, stuck, stuck in the past".
Another one pushing is young London painter Stuart Pearson Wright who won the £25,000 BP national portrait award last month with his The Six Presidents of the Royal Academy, a group portrait which features suited academics contemplating their mortality, symbolised by a dead chicken. He called on Sir Nicholas to resign as he accepted the cheque.
The 25-year-old Slade art school graduate added: "It's time for us to reconsider the role of the Tate in spending huge sums of public money. This is nothing personal against Sir Nicholas Serota, or conceptual art."
In Scotland, the recent uninspiring art school degree shows reflect a shift towards ditching drawing and painting skills and embracing ad-man trickery, slick thinking, and computer-aided art. In the way little girls want to be Geri Halliwell or boys want to be Tom Cruise, fledgling artists want to be Damien Hirst or Tracy Emin, partly because it looks like a good way to make a fast buck.
However, only so many stars can burn bright in the same firmament and we already have Douglas Gordon, Roddy Buchanan, and Christine Boreland on the homegrown cutting edge.
Scottish figurative artists who once blazed the trail of everything that was good about the art form, are now lying low or have changed direction - possibly to keep up with the Brit Art pack. Alison Watt, a BP portrait award winner with an accomplished body of portraits and self-portraits behind her, appears to have eschewed painting people in her most recent exhibitions, preferring instead to focus on folds of fabric, bed linen, and blank sheets of paper.
Ken Currie, once politically outspoken on issues affecting the politics of the art world, says he does not want to get involved in the current hot debate. Currie, of course, still shows at the BCA Gallery, in Cork Street, London.
Call him a dinosaur if you like, but artist Peter Howson remains one of Scotland's best-known names on the international circuit. The former Bosnia war artist, whose work is collected by a string of celebrities, is also brave enough to stand up and be counted in the midst of this art fracas.
Howson has made a study into the wrangle. He maintains that it is now impossible for him to have a show in a major London gallery, which at least has prod-uced the spin-off of a major exhibition opening in Scotland before touring Europe.
Howson has thrown down the gauntlet to the English art mafia with the conviction of someone with insider knowledge. A sore point on his CV is that the Tate has bought six of his large paintings, including Bosnian war paintings, but has never hung them.
His outspoken position has infuriated his personal critics, who say it is a classic case of sour grapes because his work is out of favour. Yet it endears him to others who applaud his stand against hyped market forces.
He says: "The heart of the matter is the Tate and Serota. But the word that comes to mind is corruption; corruption in the whole art world. The galleries that sell the things to the Tate - there are only four or five of them - are all in there with the Tate. They have friends of the gallery in the patrons of the Tate and on the buying committees and they protect themselves. Nearly all the critics are in the bag and dealers like Charles Saatchi prosper from it.
"I welcome Stuart Pearson Wright's position, but he should know now that there's not much chance that the Tate will buy his work, not unless the entire staff get gunned down.
"I think they bought my paintings because they thought they should, but they never had any intention of showing the work. They paid £35,000 for one painting called Plum Grove and, to me, that has now become a waste of public money."
He is hopeful a fairer future will emerge. "I think real painting will come back. The problem with all the people at the Tate is they think this is the road ahead and it will lead into new avenues. But it's not. It is a dead end. They think we are regressive and stuck in the past and should move faster, but they don't realise things don't have to."
One look at the queues to see 500-year-old paintings by Vermeer and the Delft School at the National Gallery in London, or the Rembrandts in Edinburgh, reveals the truth in what Howson says.
Stuart Pearson Wright wants a new art movement to rally to his banner of no private sales of art, public galleries only. Cynics may see this as a clever ploy since all artists want to be in major collections. However, Wright is no cynic and his appeal for the establishment of better-funded public art collections also demands paying artists a decent wage to work on art rather than pull pints in bars, or serve in fast-food chains to fund their work.
His war-cry for art embraces all forms of artistic expression, even though he admits not to having any favourite conceptual artist. "The prejudices that have begun at the very top level obviously infiltrate down through to the art schools and there is a lot of pressure on students to succumb to producing things that are acceptable. It's probably disguised as something else but it is driven by commercial interests, what is considered to be trendy, fashionable, and therefore more valid. Art schools have a responsibility.
"What worries me is that not actually buying figurative art seems to imply that it is invalid and no longer has any meaning. I find that extremely worrying."
There has to something wrong with the art business when one of the hottest young prospects declares: "I have no time for the commercial art market. I could make an enormous amount of money but I have decided not to sell any of my paintings except commissioned portraits.
"My paintings cannot be bought unless it is by public galleries where as many people as possible can see my pictures. I am trying to forge a new way in which art can be viewed dissociated from price labels.
"Seeing a price label in juxtaposition to a painting affects the way a person thinks about that painting and also affects the way the painter thinks, starts catering for a market, and starts adjusting one's style accordingly. Once a painting is sold it becomes a commodity. It is vulgar to think of a Van Gogh selling for millions of pounds when the poor bugger lived in abject poverty.
"I can't think of anything more nauseating than someone boasting to their friend that they have a Stuart Pearson Wright in their bathroom, and it cost them 'X' number of pounds, and that being a reason to admire that person because they've got the money to do it. What's it got to do with art?"
While Pearson Wright can spend his £25,000 to buy a period of artistic freedom, life is not always so clear-cut.
Glasgow artist Ronnie Heeps merges conceptual and figurative art from his WASPS studio in the Briggait. Self-taught, he avoided the academic muddle that can be art school and became a stage lighting designer for nightclubs, raves, and live performances.
Heading towards the surreal - who else would spend months painting a classic Gainsborough scene then embellishing it with a smiling cartoon sunflower? - Heeps's latest body of work is a series of "ghost" paintings in which he washes oil paint glazes over portraits of iconic figures of yesterday.
These portraits, with political and artistic bite, include Madonna and Child, God, Elizabeth Taylor, John Wayne, William Turner, Dali, Lady Agnew from the famous John Singer Sargent portrait, Margaret Thatcher, and Bonnie Prince Charlie.
Pushing the image deeper into canvas can be a dangerous procedure. Apart from making the final works almost impossible to reproduce, one glaze too many will kill it off.
Heeps, too, is keen to have his work seen - the Ghost Paintings exhibition opens at the recently refurbished an tuireann gallery in Portree, Skye, tomorrow - but he also believes artists need to sell work privately to pay the studio rent and survive. He is also critical of trends in art being dictated by the Tate and calls their purchase policy "dungeon art".
He says: "The terms figurative and conceptual aren't really the language a lot of artists use in daily life; it's more of an art historian's view.
"I believe artists should just do whatever they believe in to please themselves, not for a purely commercial purpose. A lot of the conceptual stuff has nothing to it, it is all on the surface.
"Big galleries like the Tate are trying to keep up to date by buying art, but they don't know if it's going to be the next big thing. So they try to buy it now when it's cheap. That means a lot of their art is destined for storage in the cellar. It's dungeon art."
Sir Nicholas declined to comment on calls for him to resign. He fights his corner with the public cheque book.
Seona Reid, director of Glasgow School of Art, which boasts an unparalleled record of producing successful artists, calls for a middle way. She adds: "If the visual arts can't be a broad church and can't be tolerant of each art form, then there is no hope for the world. It is ridiculous that one has to set notions of figurative art against abstract art and conceptual art. As long as people move and inspire us, it doesn't matter what it is."
Charles Saumarez Smith, director of the National Portrait Gallery, where the BP Portrait is hung each year, believes more people are interested in painting than in cutting-edge art. He adds: "For an unusually long period of time the art world has been dominated by one particular brand of practice. As a result there is a danger of this becoming the new orthodoxy."
An open letter from the Stuckists to Sir Nicholas takes on new importance as politicians continue to demand social inclusion for art. The letter says: "Never before has a movement that proclaims itself to be leading the way trailed so far behind the wishes and concerns of the society to which it considers itself superior. It peddles glibness and irony in its vacuous attempt to appear dangerous and fashionable.
"People don't want out-of-town supermarkets, they don't want GM food, and they don't want conceptual art."
All that may, or may not be, true. What is real, though, is the influence of the Tate. With 1.2m visitors a year, the gallery does not do much better than Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow and yet the resources of the two are poles apart.
Tate Modern attracts more than five million visitors and its urban regeneration has brought economic benefits of £100m; £70m of that and about 2000 new jobs are local. Perhaps, with a national audit of museums ongoing and as the Scottish Executive examines the funding plight of Glasgow's ailing museums and galleries, politicians at least will see economic sense and dig deep for art.
- July 13th
