Te Deum to the wrath of God

ETIENNE CLÉMENT: TE DEUM TO THE WRATH OF GOD: SOLO SHOW

First we had Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, part art film part homage to the balletic skills and football prowess of Zinedine Zidane, world cup winning captain of France. Now, another French artist has taken up the mantle of idolatry, former architectural photographer Etienne Clément. Evidently French creatives will not let us forget the mercurial talents and gallic heroics of Zizou, but I suppose had David Beckham taken England to international glory we’d be experiencing something similar although Beckham has appeared in a few art projects, notably Sam Taylor Wood’s Andy Warhol rip-off ‘David”.

Clément’s work involves childish figurines, reminiscent of marzipan people on wedding cakes, arranged on a stage, with a photographic backdrops of architecture and landscapes behind. The centre piece of the exhibition is a retelling of the world cup final’s most dramatic incident, Zidane’s head butt into the chest of Matterazzi, and his subsequent dismissal from the field. The aesthetic is pure playschool naivety and blue peter empty toilet rolls and double-sided sticky tape. Its football seen through the eyes of a child, vivid, colourful and distorted by the imaginings and playful embellishments of a pre-adolescent mind. The cameramen encroach onto the pitch. Zidane sports a halo, the crowd are an odd assortment of characters and figures – the match itself is being played out in a heavenly theatre – all contributing to a sense of pantomime. Which in a way is what Zidane’s feat of pique and petulance was, a tantrum on a global stage, much of the world watched France’s captain head butt Materazzi because he’d called the players sister names.

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Matt Small manages to straddle the fine art/street art divide with considerable aplomb, judging from the evidence of last nights Youngstarrs exhibition at the Black Rat Press. Urban, gritty, and iconic Small takes found metal from refrigerators, washing machines and car bonnets and fashions his portraits onto them, mixing domestic paints in a riot of violent energy.

Appropriating the discarded metal serves as a metaphor for one of the aims of his work, empowering the disempowered and marginalised in society. Where communities have seemingly been consigned to the scrap heap, either by councils or governments, or by both the media and a consensus gullible of gutter journalism stereotypes; Small aims to lift them up with his work. That they too have their place within both the galleries and society as a whole. Its staggering to consider that this subject matter is fairly revolutionary, but one has only to look through the national portrait gallery and count the faces of young black men, to gain a short sharp shock of empirical evidence of artistic exclusion.

What is obvious in this body of work is Small’s inherent love of his subjects and his deep concern not only for their welfare, but how they are perceived in society and the consequences those perceptions will have in their lives. The self fulfilling prophecy of gangster culture, drugs, criminality, prison, single parent families, poor role models, unemployment – self fulfilling but ultimately stemming to a considerable degree from negative stereotypical media clichés.

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Conceptual artist and professional trickster of the art world, Jamie Shovlin’s new exhibition with former collaborator Mike Harte is ostensibly a ’straightforward exhibition about friendship, drinking and art making.’ The artists spend seven nights drinking bourbon, whilst watching episodes of Seinfeld, and Mike Harte paints pictures of the word ‘joy’ using the bourbon as both inspiration and medium. Is there any hoax here? Any April fool waiting in the wings? Does Mike Harte really exist? They have apparently collaborated before. But has anyone ever seen him? We get to see one person on the video downstairs in the Seventeen gallery – but isn’t that Jamie Shovlin making the pictures, not Mike Harte? Do they look the same? Do I care?

Perhaps the idea is that Shovlin has an alter ego, and one could interpret this exhibition as an exposition of’ friendship, drinking and art making’ taking place in a bizarre landscape of imaginary constructs, of multiple personality disorders, inebriation, self love and self-obsession. Additionally one could say, that artistic clichés of loneliness, introspection, narcissism, thwarted hedonism and masochistic stereotypes of alcoholism abound. Perhaps this is one interpretation, but what tangibly is the audience left with?

Seven simple pictures of the word ‘joy’ on paper using bourbon as the ink. Each one slightly larger than the last correlating to the value of the bourbon consumed (by value presumably they mean price). Can you see what I’ve been saying about some art being too easily dismissible? Are these pictures even necessary as mind numbingly simple and banal as they are? Isn’t this just a way to leverage an artistic commodity out of a week spent on the piss? Is anyone stupid enough to buy one?

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The posturing within the art world knows no bounds. Take the galleries down Vyner Street that are far too achingly hip to bother with signage identifying them as galleries. Immediately upon entering the first thought is always to ask the women at the desk (for it is nearly always a women) is this a gallery? Is there an exhibition on? Where is the vital necessary bumf that explains this visual malarkey? This puts you immediately on the back foot, encroaching not only someone’s territory but also their ideological space. It’s a kind of Am I welcome here?
Do I know the rules, will I behave?
Am I smart/cool/hip/progressive/intelligent/sophisticated/modish enough to get it?

Honestly the welcome in most London galleries is frankly a little off-putting. It’s never hostile or aggressive, but cold, arrogant and snobby with an air of privilege and affluence- like meeting a young conservative. Perhaps I should dress up a bit? I know its not the opera or ballet, I know that we can wear casuals round an exhibition but perhaps I’m stretching it a little far with the semi tramp look. I call it louche chic. Perhaps I should ditch the hoody.

Anyways I always smile and say hello, a little too loudly for their liking to try and use overfriendliness to counter the subliminal dominant/submissive power play going on. The girls at the desk are nearly always young, good looking post graduates forced within the intern system to work for free, furiously word processing and other stuff that requires nailing your eyes to a computer screen for most of the day. No wonder they aren’t more chipper, they thought they were going to be making art and now they are doing admin.

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Line of Control

Art, wooh-oowh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! Say it again.
Art, wooh-oowh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!

I don’t know if Nicolas Bourriaud is familiar with the works of Frankie goes to Hollywood (seeing as I was born in 1972) that I’ve crudely paraphrased above. I can’t imagine most of the artists chosen to exhibit are. Talk about navel gazing. This is meant to be the show that demonstrates modern arts new vanguard – a brave new world of globalism, cultural relativity, engagement with the world and political and ethical discourse.

None of the works on show engage with cultural relativity or cultural conflict explicitly; much less discuss these issues in depth. A few skirt round these issues ineffectually.

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I'm Super Altermodern, are you?

Top ten signs to look out for…

1. You visit fifteen countries minimum a year. You’ve lost count of your airmiles.
2. Your artwork is just as well travelled. In fact you’ve started exhibiting the shipping crates as well.
3. Recession is just another word for not flying first class anymore.
4. You’ve taken time off from ‘changing the world.’
5. You engage in cultures and countries aside from your own, but in a totally ineffectual and bourgeois way. It’s the classic ‘view from the Hilton’ perspective.
6. You have little or no concept of how real people live, struggle and survive in your own country let alone in other countries. If you do, you certainly wouldn’t sully your art practice with it.
7. Globalisation is artspeak for making art abroad. It has nothing to do with global trade, worldwide capitalism and trade issues, an impending environmental apocalypse, international politics, spread of pathological disease, the clashing of monotheistic cultures, the arms trade etc.
8. What you know about the world beyond your studio you could write on the back of a stamp and post to a Nicolas Boulliard curated exhibition.
9. Proceeding from a point of creolisation; means you’re fluent in bullshit in more than one language.
10. You have a dead badger on your head.

This weeks load of old cobblers comes from the Anthony Reynolds Gallery- There was a glass box, I suppose you could call it a vitrine if you were pushing the boat out, of desk drawer panels stacked on top of each other by Mark Wallinger. Tedious and tiresome it was the best of a terrible lot. Then there was two school desks one laid on top of the other at an angle fixed to each other with G clamps. There was paint over one of the desks like someone had cleaned their brushes on it or something. There were bits of chewing gum stuck to the inside of the desk. Upstairs an old dining chair missing its seat was placed with white bin bags rolled out from beneath one of the chair legs. I wished at that point I hadn’t evolved a Central Nervous System.

If it had a point I simply wasn’t willing to figure it out – why should I do all the work? I wrestled through London’s public transport to arrive here – I could be in the pub instead. What work had the artist done? Nothing. There wasn’t even any blurb to satirise apart from a ‘list of works’ – although someone should sue them under the trades description act to call this ‘work’.

Work here would involve someone fixing the chair and then using the bin bags to trash the remainder of the ‘art’ on show here (although I’d prefer recycling). I’m all for using found objects. Even conceptualism or minimalism to a degree but there was no craft, no insight, no skill, no vision and little thought, – are they testing us to see how gullible the art world is?
As gullible as is conceivable would be their answer.

To illustrate how spectacularly ill conceived and thought out this exhibition is, how flippantly and carelessly it has been constructed; it was called five sculptures and there was only four on display. No doubt the void created by the missing sculpture juxtaposed the dynamicism of the conceit of attempting to portray realism in a post digital postmodernist age. Or some artspeak baloney like that. But it looked like they simply forgot to count the exhibits. The thought and endeavour behind these exhibits amounts to seconds rather than hours, is testimony to an art market that is so decadent it cannot tell good from bad or the charlatan from the real thing, and underlines the corrupt essence of conceptual minimalism and an art world led by money and celebritism rather than genius and talent.

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Nico Vascellari, Revenge, 2007.

Installation at 52a Biennale di Venezia and MAXXI, Rome.

Vascellari, an Italian musician turned art performer and conceptualist admires the work of Slayer as much as more mainstream artists like Caspar David Friedrich. What Slayer was about was a dark satanic glamour, a gothic, almost Nordic blackness. Whilst it stemmed from adolescent tendencies and recalcitrant ambitions of rebellion it was theatrical, discordant and contained huge energy and raw bestial power. With its anti-christian ideology it was two fingers up to Christianity. It was the music of white hatred – for defunct institutions, for plastic pop and off the shelf orthodoxy; it scared the parents – it was Black Sabbath with bells on.

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