On Degas at the NGA

Paint and ink have, so often, been used to conceal, dissimulate or persuade that one is almost jarred by the power of naked insight shown in the major retrospective,  'Degas: Master of French Art', at Canberra's NGA.  Degas is paradoxical in today's art world for, as we have fetishised an artist's milieu, personality and anecdotes, here is a painter who appeared to capture the most spontaneous and unguarded moments through endless and painstaking craft, a seeming anti-semite and misogynist who shows his respect for people through his realism.  Degas is a little complex for critics today, although tellingly popular.

The NGA's show is not encyclopedic, Degas was prolific and it's a testament to the quality here that without works like the Hermitage's 'Place de la Concorde' or the London National Gallery's 'Miss LaLa' the exhibition is still formidable.  The structure begins chronologically, opening with the sulky insolent self-portrait from 1857, where we meet his gaze for the first time.  Bold yet oblique that gaze was Degas' most formidable tool, he understood how vision, how we look at things, how the most important things aren't seen at the most obvious angle and how the eye is democratic if it is truthful.

In the recent times we have fetishised the idea of spontaneity in art, the smaller the distance and time between subject, painter and painting the supposedly greater its veracity.  This tendency can be directly attributed to the Impressionists and their 'en plein air' approach, the archetype for the 'natural' artist as romantic hero.  No one paints more vitally than Degas, in 'The Racecourse (Amateur jockeys close to the carriage)' he creates plane after plane of action that almost bulge out from the plane of the picture, a cropped carriage, a cut off horse fighting its rider for control and a top hatted gent who has to force himself into the bottom corner of the picture are immediately suggestive of how we experience a crowded race meet, a blur of stimulus our brains chase to keep up with.  Of course the pay-off here is that the canvas, begun in 1876 was only finished eleven years later.  No one cold ever accuse Degas of haste.  But this is what ought to make Degas great for us, he does not ask for his work to be judged on the circumstances of its making or the biography of its maker, he simply seeks to use his skill to show on canvas how the real world looks and makes us feel.  I think there can be few higher aims in art.

The breadth of work, if primarily limited to horse racing, the theatre, women at work (three of the 'themes' by which the work is arranged) and portraiture, is dizzying.  The oil paintings that are meticulous in their Velazquez like economy of effect, pastels that shimmer like daylight and the inky spontaneity of his monoprints show how Degas strove to match medium with affect.  Perhaps the most striking room is called 'Painterly Prints', composed of a significant sample of the monotypes where he demonstrated not only his spontaneity but an almost prescient eye for images that appear journalistic.  The process of monotyping requires that an artist work fast, whilst ink remains wet, and the sweeps and strokes recorded on paper are incredibly evocative of motion, light and atmosphere.  As striking are the seemingly haphazard compositions, irregular and asymetric, they are oddly cropped and sometimes the subjects are almost missed out of the picture or are a mere rumour in the inky dark.  This 'photographic' (and let us remember that Degas achieved these effects when photography was still overwhelmingly static and posed) are of course part of the character of Degas art, but in the blacks, greys and occasional startling gaslit whites of the monotypes we feel that we are looking at images captured urgent and true.

Degas command of the temporal, the captured moment whose significance is not always immediately obvious even to it participants comes back to his gaze.  What the eye just sees the mind spins stories around, and for each lurking silhouetted top hat or glance out of the frame of the painting we seek to assign significance.  This is part of Degas fascination, his narrative is compelling because it is almost always implied.

Whilst Degas was obviously consumed by the theatre and ballet he presents it to as not so much as spectacle than as microcosm.  We, the viewer, find ourselves backstage or in the wings, were we paying customers we would demand discounts because our sight lines are often obscured.  Even Degas' subjects are unsure where the spectacle is, in 'Ballet de 'Robert le Diable'' the member of the audience we focus on looks through opera glasses up and at a right angle to the plane of the stage, all human life is not to be seen there.  Clearly the play is not the thing, Degas shows us the innards, the boredom, the intrigue, the concentration and the distraction.  The accumulated message we hear might be 'if you look hard enough you will see behind this facade'.

It would be perverse not to mention 'Little dancer aged fourteen' as here it is set in the final room, spotlit in darkness and raised on a plinth.  What makes it extraordinary is that, despite this treatment she still retains a mix of vulnerability and snotty insolence.  The scale of the model is perfect, perhaps a little smaller than life size as such she demands our attention directly rather than becoming monumental or trivial.  The imperfections that mark Degas' making of her make her all the more affecting and perhaps this is why, as eerily familiar an image as she is, she never becomes banal.  Like so much else of Degas' work she appear poised to step out into our space as she has our consciousness.

Degas is one of the great painters of women.  We may question his relationship with them and their economic and social position at the time but it is women he gives the greatest compliment to, that of veracity.  His prostitutes exchange glances that speak volumes of the men they wait to serve, nudes are fleshy and honest in their self-posession and laundresses are afforded concentration, skill and composure.  'Woman Ironing (Blanchiseusse repassant)' is sharp and radical in its construction, reds and gauzy whites give the space an almost palpable humidity yet within it the veiled and bare armed the laundress is dignified in her composure.  We appear to glimpse women as best we can, they do not give themselves up to our view easily, even 'Mary Cassatt in the Louvre' will not deign to turn toward us.  Degas may not be the nicest painter of women, but he is an honest one.  If we find ourselves moved to pity, contempt or arousal it is not because the artist has loaded in contrived affect, it is because he has striven to find a moment and an image that is the most naked and humane, only that allows us to respond in such a directly emotional way.

The triumph of Degas is that he made art of a belief that each individual deserves not to be idealised or made gorgeous or noble but that the most beautiful is the most honest.  I think he shows that only by looking we might we understand, and that is why he still has the power to connect us with human truths and uncertainties today.

On Yinka Shonibare @ The MCA

Walking through the Yinka Shonibare retrospective at Sydney's MCA you have the overwhelming sense of something clever being done, you know this because you're told it repeatedly.  This comes less from the content of the works than the context, "the legacy of European colonialism, class structures and social justice" as its themes are described is serious stuff.  Who wants to be on the wrong side of the fence on any of those?  There's an awful lot of biography that you're asked to ingest with Shonibare, Anglo-African childhood, boarding schools, paralysis, somehow all of these formative influences give meaning and depth to what's presented within the show.  All this feels oddly manipulative as though we're being given the parameters of how to interpret this art before we get a chance to encounter it.

The first piece you come across in the MCA is 'The Swing (after Fragonard)' a lifesize tableau of the central figure in Jean-Honoré Fragonard's 1767 rococo masterwork "Les hasards heureux de l'escarpolette' .  We see a woman in full flight on a swing, her ancien regime tuille dress rendered in a bright African fabric.  Around her is an arc of greenery that hints at the mise en scene of the of then original.  The most important deviation is that the mannequin is headless, something variously accounted for as a premonition of the guillotine or a device to render race and identity inscrutably ambiguous.  And that's it.  It's big and it's bright and it's about art and it looks meaningful.

The subsequent rooms deliver much the same, the biggest space taken up by 'Gallantry and Criminal Coversation' a piece made up of a full size carriage suspended overhead and groups of lifesize mannequins (again dressed in eighteenth century European costume tailored from African 'Dutch wax' fabric).  The headless mannequins are variously sucking and fucking one another in groups of two or three.  The effect is a little sexy and a lot comical.  What it surely isn't is thought provoking, it looks like exactly what you'd expect an trying to be smart and shocking to produce.

The large scale video work 'Un Ballo in Maschera' has a far greater capacity to charm, each sigh and breath of fabric, the imperfect choreography and the ritualised motions are all entrancing.  The air is heavy with the trappings of meaningful silence but I was left wondering if this was just a case of taking the Africanised aristrocratic costumes to another historical locale, no further meaning or understanding has been added, it's just his 'thing'.

For all it's appearance of profundity and smart alec emptiness the show is beautiful, the Goya pastiche of 'The Sleep Of Reason Produces Monsters (Europe, Australia, Asia, Africa)' is technically accomplished in a CGI way but for once, however heavy handed it might be, I make a connection between Goya's sly hymn to the Enlightenment and the nightmares it brought to the native people of various colonies.

Clever and sensual as they are the show lacks even a hint of empathy and that's the problem.  Shonibare's work must look good on a critic's laptop, but it's devoid of the human, the art historical reference screams 'important' but the ever present quotation marks suck out much of the feeling.  The net effect of all those decapitated mannequins is to deprive us of any point of connection, we see a point made over and over again and the initially sumptuous installations quickly become banal, like someone has locked a wannabe Duchamp in Madame Tussaud's. 

Post-modern conceptual art fetishises paradox, here Shonibare is disappointingly predictable, it presents conflicting signs, removed from context by scale or placement and expects us to applaud its insight and audacity.  Of course the revolutionary value of irony is questionable in a culture like ours, it's a devalued currency and the more often we see it used as a proxy for insight the less effective it is.  The problem with the work in this show is that once the basic paradox is established: the meaning of works from the western canon changes when they come into contact with African subjects, that's pretty much it, the insight remains visual and theoretical,  juxtaposition sets up an intellectual conundrum but never touches on anything human.

In the end I'm not sure it matters.  Just the size of these works tell you that they're made for galleries, they're anything other than personal.  The exhibition as a whole ticks off just about everything that makes the art establishment feel good about itself: subversive sex, post-colonial angst, art history with a knowing wink and big flashy installations.  I don't doubt that Shonibare has an interesting point of view on the shifting cultural plates between Africa and Europe but these trite appropriations look more like a very knowing artist feeding critics a series of art-theory soundbites in the confidence that they'll always bite.

On Maria Speyer

For almost a month I've been looking at one of Maria Speyer's sketchy, intense, almost lifesize drawings on my lounge wall, and my fascination has increased, become all consuming.  Works of art become more than images when the scale and te

xture of the physical object is present, Speyer takes an intimate form, the drawing, and expands it.  The bodies are just less than human size and all the more human for it.

Speyer's line is loose and fluid, the figures sinuous, the charcoal almost trembling with intensity.  The most important technique she uses, the heart of this collection , is the building up and accumulation of graphite at the points of the greatest emotional focus, the darkness on fine textured paper becomes a metaphor for thought and communication.  Where a hand hangs in the air trying to capture a thought or two lovers press together our eyes are drawn to the blackness, the seriousness of thought.  The pictures are eloquent in their silence, the vast proportion of the surface untouched.  They are rich with the power of restraint eschewing all unnecessary effect, in doing so their very point becomes stronger.

I'm reminded of Frank Auerbach's kinetic intensity brought together with Giacometti's fluidity.  Speyer's figures achieve a kind of tensile grace through focussing on pressure points rather than every plane and surface.  The overall effect is that a lightness of touch gives an incredible corporeality to the figures, their physicality heightening their emotional resonance.

I love Speyer's art because, whilst it is ostensibly non-narrative, it hints at hidden cause and effect, the absence of the other makes us move in toward the work, it forces us to consider and empathise.  It feels as if Speyer is searching for something essential, her figures are stripped back, hairless, perhaps even skinless, she is using drawing to find what makes us human and that's a very fine aspiration.

After a month we've found the effect of the work on our wall almost meditative, spending time before it has become part of our days, I do hope Maria Speyer continues to create extraordinary work like the 'Negotiations' series, we all deserve to share in her search.

On The Henson Case

The high farce of last year's stand-off between millionaire aesthetes and provincial philistines, as internationally acclaimed photographer Bill Henson had an exhibition raided by police at the start of a media storm about child pornography and art, ought to have made a delicious and thought provoking read. However, David Marr's book, 'The Henson Case' proves to be simply another round in this intractable bout of snobbery and incomprehension rather than the analysis of the issues raised that we need.

The carefully contrived apoplexy of talkback, tabloids and Today is indeed vile, but we would be wrong to assume that when an issue is taken up by populist demagogues it is immediately invalidated.  The essential problem here is the simple denial in the art world that anyone could actually care about nude photographs of underage children sold in galleries.  At no point in the book does Marr acknowledge that the whole affair is fuelled by anything more than the philistinism and prejudice of the masses indeed dismissing their concerns as "a mishmash of anxieties".

There are issues to be answered.  One can legitimately debate, without being a prude (although this as a tough one since Marr states saying "I'm not a prude" is the surest sign you are),  whether photographing nude children, and presenting that as art, normalises their bodies as objects of desire and whether that is healthy in a society that does have concerns over their sexual exploitation.  The 'porn versus art' polarisation precludes this debate, neither side is willing to have it and it is entirely false for either to suggest they do.

Modern art, and its economies, feeds on the oxygen of transgression.  Ever since the Salon Des Refusés artists, critics and gallery owners alike have taken the breaking of norms, first of aesthetics and then social or moral, to be a mark of both progress and quality.  To be 'dangerous' or 'challenging' is wholly desirable.  This the art world claiming no offence could or should be taken is disingenuous in the extreme.  We ought to ask ourslves if Henson's work would be so valuable or lauded if it did only feature clothed children.

This is where Marr's, and the anti-censorship lobby's, arguments become disingenuous and implicitly deny opposing parties the possibility of any nuanced or subtle objections.  At this point the defence, such as I understand it, descends into farce.  Let us call it the 'Wank Fallacy'.  In short this runs something like:  

• Does something banal, let's say a shoe, become pornographic if someone masturbates over it?  Clearly not.  Thus ANYTHING that anyone masturbates over is by definition not pornography.
  

I struggled with that one as well.  Other claims remain wilfully unexamined, the idea that what was good enough for the art of earlier centuries should be good enough for us conveniently ignores that these took place in societies where child labour and pre-pubescent marriage were common, and we probably don't want to resurrect those particular artifacts.  Similarly the argument of the kids willing participation certainly does demonstrate the complexity of the issues, but it also runs uncomfortably close to the 'but she wanted it' defence.

Comedy enters the narrative with Cate Blanchett, make that "Politically committed and beautiful Blanchett".  Seemingly unaware that  most of the nation were guffawing at the preposterous 2020 summit we learn that the group of creative people involved were an organised force.  Cate Blanchett tells us that "2020 had asserted that artists were citizens' said Blanchett' that they had a place at the centre of national life'".  This betrays the sense of entitlement that is so irksome, the arts have become marginalised because of their choice or inability to be relevant.  Marr's chief contempt is reserved for Kevin Rudd, and it's informative to see why, "This was the new scholar Prime minister, the Mandarin man, the leader who had lately consorted with Cate Blanchett at the 202o summit.  But with these remarks on 'Today' Rudd killed Camelot" in short Kevin Rudd has proven himself to be a class traitor.

Class is THE great unspoken theme of the book, the effrontery of  the uneducated, of those who had never registered Henson's existence in the past, the prudery of the religious, how dare any of them pass judgement on what the consensus of a group of rich sophisticates deems to be serious.  Bob Debus offers a rare glimpse of sanity here, pointing out that as a politician he does actually have to respond to the views of vast majority of his constituents.  This is heresy to Marr, elites should stick together and just as they demand the approbation of the masses they deny them the dignity of a voice.

Not even when we hear of QCs, heiresses, publishers and national broadcasters at the Henson opening do we get a hint that this is a very exclusive club, dealing in very expensive commodities.  The operational realities of the art world are only ever dealt with to demonstrate how the moving, storage and appreciation of art are Byzantine rites conferring a priestlike status on their participants.  Never are the commercial realities spoken of, price tags, commissions, super-funds or auction prices don't belong in this world.  With Hensons trading for upward of $20,000 dollars a piece it's hard to imagine a more bizarre omission but people are 'supporters', never customers or investors.  Given the importance of notoriety you would imagine that the whole affair would be money in the bank for his brave supporters. 

And me?  Well I like censorship as little as I like the snobbery and hypocrisy of elites, I find Henson's images beautiful and cliched, a kind of portentous kitsch that is anything but challenging or insightful.  Henson and cohorts are presented as Candides, blithely unaware that they may ever cause offence, which given their experience, exposure to the trajectory of art debate in the last forty years and their very worldly success is difficult to believe.  But this lies at the crux of the issue.  When novelty and transgression are your measure of artistic worth one ought to be willing to expect a heightened and aggressive response from those who hold the norms you seek to break.  To expect otherwise is essentially juvenile, and has its echo in derivative driven financial institutions who want all of the rewards of risk but for the rest of society to pay for its downside.

The Henson affair, or something very like it will happen again.  If the art world desires both a privileged place in the government and shaping of society whist it continues to proclaim 'art pour l'art' and feed on the economics of shock that much is inevitable.

On Ocean Without A Shore

If you can you really ought to visit Melbourne's NGV and spend some time with Bill Viola's 'Ocean Without A Shore'.

Those familiar with Viola will recognise some of the the themes, the transience of life and the intensity of the human, and the format, a triptych of video screens in a darkened room.  However the 'Ocean' is deep and moves profundly.

It's important to know that the piece was first staged in The Church of The Oratorio of San Gallo in Venice, at Bienalle, and that the format, three screens, placed here, on plinths set against the walls of a self contained room, were originally set on the altars of that medieval building.  Each screen is as tall as a man and the three are set at right angles from one another, watching from the space in front we can see all three.

On each screen, in an ongoing loop of ninety minutes, we see one figure at a time in the far distance, grey against a grainy black that slowly approach us.  As they draw nearer we start to recognise features, traits and begin to attribute speculative attributes to them, we are drawn in by their slow passage to the foreground and curious about their story, their reticence.  Almost lifesize now, we notice that the grisaille figure is separated from us by a dividing veil, a thin constant curtain of water, as the figure reaches through, brushes against the water, they also break through a wall of light, the effect is prismatic, sparkling, electric.  Once through the curtain, in part or whole, the figures, people now, appear in full colour, high definition.  Each reacts differently, some are elated, others hesitant, some overcome on contact with the world of light an colour.  Each stays a while and then, leaving nothing but an unanswered question of a story they pass back through the curtain and recede into the distance.  As this happens on one screen we realise we are at a different point in a journey on another, or that we are in the presence of two people or alone in the space again, the synchronicities and interactions make us wonder if they are designed or coincidental, if the people who look out from the screens are aware of one another or even us.

The cumulative effect is moving and, at once manages to be both hypnotic and stimulating.  It is an intensely humane experience that manages to be both direct and subtle.

Viola cites a number of sources of inspiration for the work, the title coming from the Andalusian Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi.  He also explains that the people represent ghosts or spirits with the curtain of light and water the threshold between this world and another.  If this is one explanation the power of the work rests in the way it can support so many interpretations.  Perhaps it's fitting that a work so humane and layered should be inspired by one living in Andalucia's convivencia, when Christian, Jew and Muslim lived in more or less harmonic accord to create some of the most remarkable and humane art and literature the world has seen.

Personally I felt I was experiencing a meditation on the individual and his contact with the world around him, between the conscious and subconscious, between the personal and the other.  The effect of each figure breaking through the wall is for them appear to step through the plane of the picture and into our space, their presence is almost physical.  Once through the plane each person is framed from mid though upwards, only a little higher than us, as a result we might be looking through a portal into another room, the other world left behind.  Sometimes two people are 'on our side' and we might read a flicker of recognition, a need to communicate, or perhaps just our own need to place a narrative on these souls as we watch them in their moment in the sun.  And that might be the core of the power of the piece, Viola gives us the raw sodden vulnerability of normal looking people but not their story, we reach out to them and realise that to be human is to need to share out stories.

The occasional Viola piece suffers from an actorly earnestness on the part of the participants, that's happily absent here, the performances, such as there are, are all restrained the emotion crackles in between their presence and our own, it doesn't need to be telegraphed.  Instead there is an aching need for contact, a realisation that although now in our space we are still, essentially, alone unless we reach out.

This might be the best of Viola's work for many years, 'Five Angels For The Millennium" was literally sublime but one suspected it relied on scale for much of its affect, "The Passions" was marred by the odd piece of hammy gurning whilst "The Tristan Project" veered a little toward the pop video fireworks.  In "Ocean Without A Shore" Viola shows his mastery of space, form and content and creates something pregnant with meaning and emotion.  

Sitting in the room I was reminded of both the transcendent magnetism of some of Rothko and the bare naked humanism of Rembrandts portraits, through different means Viola reminds us that there is more, and that we find it as we cross the gap between ourselves and other people.