A Guest Arts and Culture Review by Doctor Anthony Beauregard Peabody (BA Arts, MA Fine Arts, PhD Feminist Brush Theory)
Walking through the twist and turns of this hallowed gallery, you might be tempted to look around, regard the ingenious shapes and striking blobs of colour and bits of string, and loudly proclaim “are you serious, mate?”
If you’re a troglodyte, that is. But, however, you’re not some moaning, murping, whingey, artless, illiterate, soulless, blind, uneducated, lower-middle-class scum, just as I am not. And so you – just like me – would be refreshed and invigorated by the breath-taking display of modern art pieces in this fine curation: a bold and daring redefinition of what “art” really means.
Jean Helion (1904 – 1987)
My review begins - as all great reviews of timeless work do – at the beginning, with French abstractist Helion’s Abstract Composition. Skillfully thrown together in 1934 using bold oils, contrasting schemes and shapes etched using a wonky ruler, the piece is as challenging as it is beautiful. Far from the photo-realistic oil paints of a bygone era, Helion focuses his brush to devastating effect in a neo-performative critique of the Marxo-social feminine ideal. Using his mother as a model and sniffing deeply of the turpentine, Helion’s simplistic shapes remind us of a childhood era of peace, innocence, and fucking around in MSPaint drawing ovals and filling them in with that paintcan thingy. Marvellous, isn’t it?
Piet Mondrian (1872-1944)
Following Helion’s genius is Mondrian’s 1935 seminal chef d’oeuvre, Compostion B. While the name might be lacking in sophistication and hidden meanings, the painting itself is not: he uses white. He uses black. He uses squares. He uses lines. To the untrained eye, it might appear a lacklustre effort – something painted when the crackpipe is empty and you have nothing to eat but dry pasta and butter. But its mastery lies in the white space. We’ll get onto white space in a bit, but rest assured that this is just the first gobsmacking example of artistic brilliance.
Joseph Beuys (1921-1986)
A too-often-heard criticism of art is the requirement for colour, innovation, technique, and “making it at least nice to look at”. However, Beuy’s impromptu oeuvre in 1974, the infamous For the lecture: ‘The Social Organism: a Work of Art’ does away with such retrogressive limitations. A frenzy of chalk and animal-like, kinda-looks-like-a-person-I-guess shapes are drawn together with furious zeal, outlining the social construction of the world and man and beasts places within that ever-shifting, complex web. It’s, like, deep.
Beuy’s profound discontentment with the limitations of conventional art – such as being able to just draw a horse that looks like a goddamn horse – are not capped at his bestial designs: his obliteration of basic writing and spelling that makes your doctor’s script look like calligraphy cement the movement’s deep revolution away from the restriction of the Old Masters.
Unknown author
This next piece is awe defined. While abstractists and modern art turns away from the sour conventions of old, this piece turns that discontentment on itself. Welding and silver-washing steel into a centrepiece, the artist scatters recreations of excrement around it. However, in a galling and audacious shunning of contemporary modern technique, the scat is not, in fact, made from his own faeces. Rather, he makes the puzzling choice of bronze. Why a modern artist would use metalwork when there is a perfectly good belly of shit inside him, ready at any moment to be couched and splattered in a glorious, counter-contemporary cascade into an oily, thick puddle of brilliance, or smeared with his own hands - perhaps mixing it with the period blood of his wife - onto a canvas, is beyond me – but his efforts are, indeed, commendable.
Ceal Floyer (1968)
Simplistic pieces that leave the audience reeling and gawping at the wall are this exhibition's forte, and no piece is no different. Since its creation in a Sainsbury’s in Holborn in June of 2009, Monochrome Till Slip has been leaving audiences gobsmacked. Using just 49 all-white items that cost about 55 pounds sterling, this 30 000-pound masterpiece challenges the viewers conception of not just colour, but value. “What is colour?” he muses; “Is white a colour?” he ponders; “Jesus, have I been binning 30 000 pounds every time I go shopping?” he queries.
Various Authors – white spaces
This aforementioned concept is a central theme in modern art. Indeed, just as famed masters of old were celebrated for producing spectacular work filled with vibrant colours, awe-inspiring figures, and bold techniques, so too do the new masters do exact the same thing just with none of that. Ellsworth Kelly’s (1923-2015) provoking 1974 creation White Curve is just one of these, but the gallery is bedecked with them: a moving tribute to the nothing. For after all, without nothing, how could there be anything? With no paint, no brush, no frame, no material, no content, is art defined in and of itself, or defined as a contrast to purity, to a null, blank nothingness? All technique can only be identified in the absence of such; and all art can only be identified in the absence of art. But then, is this now art? Does a nothing that defines a something make it, indeed, a something itself? I’m very smart. I hope you’re following.
It doesn’t end with Kelly, however: blank canvases bring negative space screaming into fruition. In one example, three blank canvasses hang side-by-side, a stunning riposte to the outmoded ideals of what constitutes a “body of works” or “portfolio”. Are they all just the same blank canvas? Or are they reinterpreted and their meanings recodeified with each subjective appraisal, “um”, “ah”, and “what the fuck is this bullshit”? These works are exquisite: a communico-performative social reconstruction that uses both negativeness and audience to reframe art as a conceptulisational referencing Jurgenialist non-adaptive recreation.
In some cases, it was just a blank wall, with a blanked-out explanation box. Bold. Simple. Beautiful. Genius.
Art as trash; trash as art
By now, many criticisms have been offered as to the value of this art. Not its literal value, as that has been established by art houses and taxpayers, but its value as an artistic project. “This is garbage,” some may cry, from their places at the trough. But this is the exact, surgeon-like accuracy of the artistic project: to challenge the hegemonic conventions of art by using a Thingymajigian approach to High-Balderdashian Obfuscationalism so as to instill an anti-traditionalist critique of the problematic oversimplification of art as “something that’s nice to look at” or “that makes us feel something”.
And they are right. Oft-times, the art is garbage. Crafted from the detritus of society and pulled from council tips, these recreations make us ask “is this really an old blanket?” and “is this really just a dirty bucket squeezed between a milk carton and a Styrofoam brick, a combination that uses elitist posturing and jargon to alienate those who don’t see the Emperor’s New Clothes?”
“What is waste, and what is wasted?” we must question. Regard this following piece:
The material is a bold choice. Flimsy and tacked together at the last minute – just like its premise – it makes the audience wonder ‘wire-we looking at this?’. Of course, the exhibit doesn’t stop there, as it is a cornerstone of modern art is to stray from cliché materials to recreate a new art.
Untitled (toilet paper, wooden floor) is one such offering. This piece, by an unknown author stops you dead in your tracks. Situated not on a wall or in a demarcated area, it breaks the boundaries of the limiting gallery context, a space beleaguered with rules and restrictions. Where you cannot touch other pieces, this sturdy construction from simple toilet paper and the artists excrement is not beset by such limitations. You can even, if you want, touch it, or rub it against your cheek – as I did, several times. A sublime challenge to demoded conventions.
This simple creation is just a fraction of a larger setpiece. Hidden in a smaller tiled exhibition space demarcated merely by traditional signs for males, females, and disabled persons, a series of miniature sculptures in porcelain, paper and steel carry this anti-conventional message to powerful new heights. By drawing on real life gender divisions in society, enforcing them on the audience, and creating a performative space that critiques human waste creation, it makes for truly puissant art.
You see, that is the Tate Modern’s true success. Walking out, the audience is left perplexed and deeply unsettled, questioning the very definition of art itself. Alas, I must admit that this is a feeling that is muted and spoiled by the curators decision to ruin the unilateral, message-laden exhibition with lackluster works by Degas, Monet and that plebiscite's abstractist, Picasso. What is this, the fucking Louvre?
9/10 stars except for the floor for Georgia O'Keeffe
