Schjerfbeck (wikipedia)
Schjerfbeck was possessed of a unique vision, and it is time the world recognised that.
Portraiture seems to have a less developed sense of the boundaries between fiction and history than literature, but Schjerfbeck's work creates a series that is "among the most moving and accomplished autobiographies-in-paint."
"If I were reincarnated in another life I would still be making collages, and if I could take them to the moon I would."
Fascinating collages from a Bucharest tramp. More from The Guardian (including a gallery).
Caravaggio was rediscovered because of the camera
The Filter^ likes Caravaggio. Back in April 2004 Steve posted an article about David Hockney's bold conjecture that Caravaggio used lenses:
To use scientific, albeit basic, propositions to understand art history provides a fresh approach. I also like the commercialisation of the thesis, in the form of a glossy hardback book, endorsed by a famous contemporary artist - good, technical ideas shouldn't be restricted to peer-reviewed journals.
That prompted a comment from David Stork:
While the scholarly community was caught off guard by the media onslaught and extraordinary media advantage of Mr. Hockney and his public relations experts, the slow, careful analysis of experts who follow accepted protocol of expert peer-review journal articles rather than broad popular presentations in the popular media, are rebutting piece by piece each of the bold claims of Hockney
I've not really waded into the debate, but from afar find it fascinating. So I was interested to read Jonathan Jone's naivety in The Guardian:
I've never given much thought to his relationship with photography – until now
Interesting throughout. Also, in the process of writing this article I looked back through the "art" category of The Filter^. There's a few real gems. We aint all about economics.
In 1939, as the Soviet Union invaded Finland, no one could have imagined how this event would fundamentally contribute to the portrayal of the gay man across Europe and America for the rest of the twentieth century. Yet this moment in history, or rather Finland’s subsequent deal made with Nazi Germany in Operation Barbarossa, was to have such an impact on the developing mind of a young commercial illustrator in Helsinki, that it should surely appear (at least as a footnote) in any history of homosexuality written about the last 100 years.
“All my early sexual experiences were with German soldiers,” the artist Touko Laaksonen was to say in 1991, “no one made a uniform like the Germans.” These words obviously carry an awkward resonance, not least for Laaksonen himself; and though it may seem at first a somewhat flippant argument, a reductive view of the true horrors of Nazi atrocities across Europe, what Laaksonen states there is a firebrand moment, something that was to massively shape the way in which we view gay men today.
We should start with a little about Laaksonen and why he matters to you, whatever your sexuality, whether you have heard of him or not.
No matter how you look at it, Touko Laaksonen is not a household name. Yet the importance of this Finnish illustrator can not be underestimated: “if one had to list the dozen or so most influential gay male visual artists of the last three decades,” Thomas Waugh wrote in Out/Lines, his 2002 history of gay graphical art, “one would have to include him among the likes of General Idea, Gilbert and George, Keith Haring, David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe, Pierre and Gilles, Andy Warhol and Bruce Weber.” And yet, as I’ve already suggested, it is quite possible that you have not heard of Laaksonen at all. This is partly because for the main part of his career, Laaksonen published his pictures under the rather grand nom de plume, ‘Tom of Finland’, and in certain houses, that is a household name. Yet whilst we have almost certainly heard of Hockney, no matter what our sexuality is, it is the nature of Laaksonen’s art that means he has not reached widespread appeal.
Laaksonen, to put it bluntly, is Finland’s most famous pornographer. His illustrations – mostly monochrome, linear drawings (though early and later work makes use of pastel to a greater extent) – depict men of astonishing physical proportions engaged in extremely graphic sexual acts. It is probably fair to say that whereas with Hockney one might seek out his art on purely aesthetic grounds, with Laaksonen, there is usually a need to be drawn to the subject-matter of his work before you know of his existence. Whilst Hockney might creep a swimming pool scene into the quiet clip-frames of ‘cultured’ heterosexual suburbia – a curled up sausage-dog, even perhaps a daring, innocent male nude hanging on the bathroom wall – it is probably fair to say that there are disappointingly few heterosexual people with a Laaksonen print hanging above their fireplaces. One might even wish to argue that what I am writing about here is not even ‘art’ at all. Yet this distinction between Hockney and Laaksonen, to which we might apply those bulky, broadly useless terms: “high” and “low” art, does perhaps explain something of why Laaksonen has had so much influence.
His work was produced at a time before the decriminalization both of hardcore pornography and homosexuality (it was to remain illegal in Finland until 1971, classed as a mental illness until 1981, and illegal to ‘promote’ homosexuality until 1999). Laaksonen’s pictures first appeared in the American ‘physique’ magazines of the 1950s. Between the photographs of oiled bodybuilders in semi-modest posing pouches, (in order – you must understand – to present what might be achieved from lifting weights and wholesome living), these magazines printed suggestive illustrations of ‘all-male’ men. Parallels can be drawn between this work and the genre of heterosexual ‘Cheesecake’ art or GGA in America of the same period. They are outwardly ‘innocent’ images, merely representations of the male, muscular physique; yet they tread that curious line between the everyday innocence demanded by censorship and the total depravity that might occur should a woman’s step onto a bus be cut short by a sudden gust of wind beneath her skirts. The art of both plays upon the idea that sex is always lurking beneath the surface of daily life; the most mundane occupation is always waiting to be subverted into sexually charged possibility. It is the denial that censorship creates that makes this art powerful. The forbidden representation often becomes the subject for the work itself, playing with situations where sex should be inappropriate for the very reason that censorship demands that all sex in art is inappropriate.
Beneath the surface publication of Laaksonen’s drawings of muscular lumberjacks submitted to Physique Pictorial, he was also producing hardcore underground storybooks. It is these that must be considered to have had the greatest impact on gay culture. For years before the decriminalization of homosexuality, pornography such as this was one of few representations of gay life available – certainly one of few that presented the homosexual man in a positive light. Of course, Laaksonen was not the only artist of this nature at work during this period, but by 1960 he had become the main illustrator for Physique Pictorial, and in part because he was the most visible of the underground artists, it is his art that has best endured.
Though heavily based in fantasy, for many years it was only this underground pornography that offered a real sense of what it was to be gay. The main function of the storybooks is clearly to titillate, but because of this peculiar position, it should not be underestimated quite what a formative role these images were to have on the attitudes of the men who read them. Films, art, novels – a role that all art plays which is perhaps not always immediately acknowledged, is the means it has to develop the personalities of its consumers. In 1959 a man might watch Cary Grant at his local picturehouse and acquire from his performance the mannerisms of a suave and stylish lover. He might do so on a conscious level; practicing at home before the mirror the deft ease of removing a matchbook from his pocket, or he might merely repeat a line from the film without thinking one evening at a dance. He might simply begin to carry himself in the same way that his film idol does. This kind of emulation occurs all of the time, and of course we might turn to Cary Grant no matter what our sexuality. It is no doubt a survival instinct – we seek to acquire the skills of others around us that we perceive to be useful to us. As a gay man in 1960s America then, the sources for emulation specific to your sexuality might be restricted to underground pornography. To state the case far too simply: Tom of Finland taught a generation of homosexual men how to be gay.
Urgh. There… I’ve said it. Of course that’s not true. It’s far more complicated than that, but as a crass oversimplification it might convey something of the influence that this single man had on the ‘gay aesthetic’ of the twentieth century. His contribution was fundamental, both in the way that gay men saw themselves, and in how heterosexual people saw them. One does not have to be aware of Laaksonen to have been influenced by him. Without his artwork so many cultural stereotypes that you do know would not now exist. I would argue that if it were not for Laaksonen, we would not have had The Village People; cartoons in the Daily Mail would not use the moustachioed, leather-hatted figure as a shorthand with which to peddle homophobia; so many jokes, so much comedy would probably not exist; but most importantly if it were not for Laaksonen it would no doubt be a far less life-affirming experience to be open about your sexuality in the modern world.
And in turn, a lot of this might be traced back to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Finland in 1939. We need at this juncture to be open and frank about what we mean by fetishism. To put things plainly, I would say that what I mean in this instance is the extension, or redirection, of sexual desire into inanimate objects (or facets) not necessarily directly connected with sex. For Laaksonen, his fetish was uniforms; in particular it was leather boots. It does not take a great deal of enquiry or cod-psychology to understand why this might have been the case. Laaksonen was the son of school teachers; respectable middle-class figures. He grew up in a society where expression of his sexual desires could result in two years imprisonment and as a result there is a certain level of repression through his formative years. The positive images of masculinity – the thing that he was naturally drawn to – came in the form of the woodsmen and labourers that he saw growing up, who he began drawing at the age of ten. These men could not have been more different from the figures of either himself or his father, and the thing that united them was the footwear of their labour. Aged ten, he begged his parents to buy him a pair of these boots, the connection already made between these objects and the men who he admired. He secretly wore the boots to bed until one night he was caught by his mother. Only a country like Finland could have produced this man; it was the stark dichotomy between his respectable home life and the proximity to the wildness of the forester that no doubt so shaped his image of the world. He was both close to these men who worked near his home, and yet in terms of who he was, could not be further removed for them.
The arrival of German troops in Finland was to crystallize his attraction to leather boots and also result in his fetishisation of uniforms. In 1939, aged 19 Laaksonen was living away from home for the first time, studying art in Helsinki. The arrival of these new men coincided with his first homosexual encounters. We might notice in ourselves certain recurring facets in the people we are attracted to that develop from our first sexual experiences. Teenage crushes might continue to be pursued in developing forms throughout our adult life. For Laaksonen, the first men he was to have sex with were all in Nazi uniform.
There is understandably much unease about this fact amongst admirers of Laaksonen’s work. Many of his early works feature men in Nazi uniform and in later life he was at pains to distance himself from these images, of which very few still survive. Yet the danger is that we try to deny the influence that the Nazi uniform had upon his aesthetic sense. The German presence in Finland in the 1940s must to an extent have seemed to be a salvation from the Soviet Union, though by no means an easy alliance. Germany acted as the country’s rescuer and this is undeniably a theme that runs through much of Laaksonen’s stories. Yet the moral dimension of Nazism is not what his art fetishises at all; it is merely the material culture of it. Obviously the two cannot be wholly seperated, and so it is understandable that he adapted his reference points to be directed at a more general image of the uniform. Despite this, almost all of his imagery may be traced back to the same genesis; the peaked caps, the highly polished black leather belts, the epaulettes and jodhpurs worn by so many of his characters, might all be considered to be merely adaptations of the uniform of the Wehrmacht.
The form in which this aesthetic most confidently settled was in the character of Kake who appeared in a series of twenty-six storybooks from 1968 onwards. Kake, “a sort of Johnny Appleseed” figure as Dian Hanson describes him in the introduction to the Taschen collection of Laaksonen’s work, developed various aspects of the uniform fetish in the form of a leather biker. The look that was styled perhaps most obviously on Marlon Brando in the film The Wild One, was an already existing image that had been adopted by many demobbed servicemen after the second world war. It resounds with various aspects of military style, and yet ventures also a freedom, a dangerous lawlessness that was found outside of army life. Though other artists occasionally toyed with this image, it was Laaksonen who most resolutely claimed the leather biker as a gay icon, finding that it chimed with the rebellion of expressing homosexuality as well as offering a homocentric cultural group.
Kake’s first appearance in a story titled ‘The Intruder’ is an interesting example of this lawlessness. The opening frame depicts Kake dressed all in leather, spying on a young man changing in his bedroom. In the next scene once the man is in bed masturbating beneath the covers to a heterosexual porn magazine, Kake breaks into the room through the open window. The following frames depict Kake subjecting the somewhat reluctant straight man to a series of sexual acts, which only finally he begins to enjoy. Our hero here is presumably the eponymous Kake, and clearly the morality of what is essentially a rape is a rather dark one. The straight man is apparently ‘liberated’ from his mistaken ways with the magazine (now conspicuously discarded on the bedroom floor) and finally returns Kake’s passionate kiss affirming his repressed homosexual desire. Yet the act is not without consequence; the man’s father enters the room surprising the couple four scenes from the end; Kake attempts to flee, but halfway out of the window the father closes the window on him with his legs still inside the room. In the final scene the father proceeds to sodomise the trapped intruder, in front of his delighted, masturbating son.
On its basest level it conveys the same message of almost all of Laaksonen’s stories, his fantasy that deep-down all men are homosexual, even that most taboo of possibilities, a man’s father; at the same time it stands as a near-direct parallel for Finland’s invasion by the Soviet Union and its subsequent rescue by the ‘Fatherland’; but most importantly it depicts a savage political satire on the repression of homosexual men. ‘The Intruder’ appeared the year before the Stonewall riots, and the image of Kake is firmly based in that spirit of rebellion, redressing the image of the homosexual as the underdog. Laaksonen’s early work depicts much more effeminate figures, but Kake’s strength is his sexuality. In part, ‘The Intruder’ satirises the corruption of those who wished to repress gay men; we might be uneasy with Kake’s forced advances on the son, but the father’s response is an equal act (added to which is the implication of incest which serves to undermine the received image of the family unit as a secure moral foundation), but the story does not seek to rest blame on any party. Actually what all of Laaksonen’s stories promote is the sense of equality, everyone ends up enjoying the sex in his pictures and no figure ultimately dominates.
In the 1984 storybook ‘Postal Rape’ we find a jack-booted and jodhpured Kake now clearly much older and sporting a moustache – a look very like that of Freddie Mercury whose image owed a great debt to Laaksonen’s drawings. It is also a rather sweet aspect of the Kake stories that the character ages alongside his original readers. In ‘Postal Rape’ Kake punishes his postman for creasing a piece of mail. There is a joke, of course, on the envelope’s legend: DO NOT BEND, and the story develops as a series of consequences to this one erring act. Yet the outcome is that retaliation only breeds further reprisals, and that as such, sex is not about the dominance of one person over another, as such roles break down until everyone is doing something to someone else.
There are clear precedents in this kind of storytelling in the sexual comedies of the eighteenth century, in the novels of Fielding, Cleland and Defoe; but whereas those works served to portray a certain liberation in the role of women, Laaksonen’s storybooks defined the emerging image of the newly-legal gay man. There are many chickens and many eggs in all of this; how much did this underground pornography serve to represent the already existing promiscuous gay and leather subculture, and how much did it act in the invention of it?
What is clear however, is that Laaksonen’s art is an important representation of gay men that contributed to the changing attitudes to homosexuality in the twentieth century. Even amongst other underground pornography from the 1950s and 60s there is a tendency to present the homosexual as somehow less-than-male. The aesthetic conventions served to feminise the gay man, often presenting him as a ‘fairy’ or a ‘queen’. Laaksonen responded by focusing on the facets that defined masculinity, exaggerating them, and elevating the figure of the gay man to heroic proportions. The message of this, to the many men who furtively turned to his artwork, was that homosexuality was not a deficiency but something that could be hypermasculine, something even enviable.
Since his death in 1991 his work has been represented by the Tom of Finland Foundation, which seeks to promote the cultural merits of erotic art and healthier, more tolerant attitudes about sexuality.
Meanwhile, to Liverpool, where the tangible feeling of excitement about 2008 and the Capital of Culture title has exploded into a visual manifestation of sheer wonderment. Richard Wilson (no, not that one) has installed his new work, Turning the Place Over, in the abandoned Cross Keys House, Moorfields, just opposite the Merseyrail station. That the building used to house a Yates' Wine Lodge makes its cultural transformation all the sweeter, as I hope you will agree as you view a video of the work here. These pictures say more than words ever could.
The official opening of the work will be on 20th June during Architecture Week, and it will continue until the end of 2008.
Times were I'd bound through the gates of Tate Modern with real enthusiasm, yet now I'm a cynic. The experience it offers is not how I remember it, and I'm not sure why.
The building does look tired, and dated. The freshness of the conversion has become familiar, and I'm more likely to notice litter, cracks, and leaking taps than the remarkable Turbine Hall, now preparing for the latest Unilever Series. Last years was underwhelming, and first glance of the work in progress leads to similar feelings - hmph.
When I was younger it was all new to me, now it's same old. The same old gang, just hung differently. It all feels stale, and clubby: the Chris Ofili "scandal" was indicative of the whole charade.
A current exhibition I recently saw - and enjoyed - explores the birth of modernism. No, not Kandinsky (a typical blockbuster chock full of schoolkids and twattish footwear) but "States of Flux". An interesting (but frustrating) take on early modernism: cubism, futurism and vorticism were all on the menu, but it didn't expand my understanding of either. On the contrary by lumping all three into one room it smacked of convenience: the subtleties sacrificed for the story.
The story was where the exhibition ended (and began, in a thrilling entrance room): Pop Art. We're whisked through the decades to (once again) take a cartoonish eye over consumerism. The thread is weaved in a contrived manner: I noticed desks featuring in the work of two artists. Are desks central to the Art of Flux? I don't think so, but it's a sneaky trick to artificially coax the narrative. In the Takahashi "room" I read with amusement:
some additonal items were added...including the desk and chair
Despite the convenience of learning art through a chronology of movements, I'm just deeply averse to being told that "artists" switched "from a fascination with the city to a cynicism of mass-consumerism." Who did? We're talking (overall) about different people over different times and is the sort of nonsense theory that occurs when abandoning methodological individualism. It's the consequence of forcing a modernist thirst for central narrative onto a complex storyline. I'd like to look at a painting without being told how it "fit's in" to those around it. Show me the art, and let me make my own associations. This was brilliant.
One of the most fascinating rooms was "USSR in Construction", dedicated to the 1930s magazine of the same name (see here), but it angers me that ultra-modernism is placed as a (inevitable?) consequence of what came before. That the city creates city planning, or dynamism begets socialism - Schumpeter might be placated but only indirectly because it isn't true. The path to modernity wasn't inevitable, because The Fatal Conceit occured: hyper formalism in science Science, modernity, Socialism - all the folly of confusing rational thought with Rational thought. The lesson must be to:
"demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."
The same goes for the Tate: this article should have been a review of Kandinsky. Unlike James I don't feel it's the end of "palatable human civilisation", but that's probably due to my last remaining fissures of youth. When I'm as wise as he is now, I'm sure i'll feel the same.
Tilt-shifting is a photographic technique that creates a gradient in the focus of the camera. The effect is to make large objects appear miniture. The expert at this is Olivo Barbieri, check out a profile and gallery. Alistair Allen explains more.
Tate Britain displays British art from 1500 to today. Yes, it’s a big museum, but it’s also like a big living room. All those works of art are yours.
Create your own collection.
(Printed Gallery Guide, Tate Britain, 2006)
The above text, along with Big Brother, t-shirts embroidered with the word TOSSER, and Derby city centre, marks the end of palatable human civilisation for me. It is partially on account of these 33 words that my body will be found in woodland in the early hours of tomorrow morning, my face largely unrecognisable due to repeated attempts to cave in my own brain with the sole of my shoe. I would like to extend my sympathies to the elderly dog walker who will stumble upon my still gibbering corpse, and also to the rest of you who will not have escaped this fiery decent into the burning hell of mediocrity and half-witted spoon-feeding of slurry that will gradually encroach upon your waking days.
In my left hand, crumpled into a fist and partially stained with leaf mulch, will be a leaflet from Tate Britain’s Your Collection series. Ironically it will be The Calming Collection; a guide to the gallery, which aims to introduce the visitor to calming works of art. It won’t have worked.
The Your Collection series of leaflets are currently the main guides used to direct visitors around Tate Britain. There are racks of them everywhere. The idea is that visitors can select works of art suited to their current moods. Art as therapy, is clearly a large part of the idea and so whatever your personality or ailment you can select from the I’m Hungover Collection, the I’ve Just Split Up Collection, the I Have a Big Meeting Collection or the I Like Yellow Collection.
I know I am supposed to laugh. I know that I am supposed to find these leaflets whimsical and light-hearted. I know, I know, I know.
But it isn’t just the leaflets; it is the whole Tate experience. Tate. Not The Tate. Tate. Not The Tate Gallery. Tate. Tät. T.
Without doubt, Tate holds one of the most significant collections of art in the country. It will be for many their first experience of art, especially of modern art. It has a massive responsibility to get things right, and I don’t envy them their position one bit. They have four galleries across the country and each of these upholds the same values, the same standards of presentation. The same Tate ethos, identity, branding.
And this is where things start going wrong, because on the face of it, it all seems to work. There is a deep philosophical thought behind the identity of Tate. The dropping of the definite article in the gallery’s name, an act which is upheld within the organisation with almost religious fervour, does on an immediate level serve an important function: Tate is not just Tate Britain, nor Tate Modern, nor St. Ives, nor Liverpool. It is something bigger, an experience that transcends all these geographical locations, so that whichever Tate you enter, you receive the same kind of experience. It’s a bit like God in this respect. Or Sony Erickson.
Which is fine, which is good. We all like to buy Sony products because we like the reassuring click we get from pressing their buttons. We like their sound quality and the unashamed use of square corners in their design. In a way Tate is good in this respect. We know what we are getting. We aren’t going to wander into a room and find the kind of painting that hangs in our local Chinese takeaway. Thank you Tate, for allowing us not to mistake that kind of thing for Art.
In a way it does much the same thing as Edward Young’s designs for Penguin Books did in the 1930s. (A brief mention is here required of Phil Baines’ excellent book Penguin By Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005, a lovely and informative work, which I would recommend you all go out and buy.) Young’s designs for Penguin were intentionally blank canvases; colour denoted the different subject areas but other than that, the content of the book was not hinted at from the outside. There is a great value in this; the reader is able to approach the book with more or less a clear mind. The book cannot be judged by its cover, so the reader’s responses to it are drawn entirely from the words on the page and from their own experiences. They do not pick it up thinking ‘this is a book that will make me happy’ or ‘this is a book that will help me get over my divorce’ or any such tosh as that. They read because they want exposing to things beyond themselves, and the anonymity of the Young designs allows this to happen.
And to a certain extent it looks as if Tate achieves this too. It certainly plunders much from the Penguin style of branding, the adoption of a sans serif typeface, the application of the identity in different colours to denote locality (Tate Britain, orange; Tate Modern, plumby-cerise; Liverpool, purple; St. Ives blue) but it debases it. It shares very little of the same democratic ideology. The identity of Tate intrudes into every aspect of the gallery visit; you are made to see things Tate’s way. In the galleries information labels veer towards the interpretive nugget, rather than giving biographical or historical information. In fact the historical approach to art is deemed so unfashionable, that such methods of usurping its direction, such as the Your Collection leaflets at Tate Britain and the recent re-hanging of the permanent collections at Tate Modern have been brought about in the hope that no one will have to think too hard at any given moment.
The always excellent Peter Campbell in the current London Review of Books, considers this re-hanging:
[Christian Marclay’s piece Video Quartet] offers little for you to go on thinking about.
Which doesn’t mean that you want to be told what to think. Nothing makes clearer Tate Modern’s particular problems and failures in relation to the new displays than a sentence to be found on the map of the collection you pick up from the information desk. It reads: ‘The gallery’s displays have recently been changed, which means you can view works from the Tate collection in exciting new ways.’ New ways? Blue spectacles? Upside down? The notion that curatorial skill in rearranging the stamp album will alter your view of the Cubist painting you have always known and want to see again, that it will take on a new life because it has been allocated new neighbours, implies that it has somehow become stale through too-long exposure. Once you start believing it is the curator’s job to liven up what they curate, explanations follow. No joke survives an explanation and no work of art can be vivified by one. There are things you may want to know, but that desire follows on a response, a reaction of some kind generated by the work itself. This applies particularly to what is ‘difficult’. (The word itself is a confusion.)
Let not anyone enter a Tate gallery and be made to find their own way. It is the experience of Tate that is on sale; the Bankside site, more a shopping mall where customers talk on mobile phones on the escalators and take photographs though being encouraged not to. They do. Just type Tate into an image-hosting site such as Flickr and you will find hundreds of images breaking countless copyright regulations. Campbell notes in his piece that with the exception of the Rothko room, that none of the building has been specifically designed to display any individual exhibits to their best advantage. I would add to this exception, the room that displayed Cornelia Parker’s Cold Dark Matter; an intimate space that allowed a very personal exploration of the piece, though I suspect that this has not been kept in the re-hanging.
The art is the backdrop to the experience. It is virtually impossible to concentrate on the works in these spaces, and this is a terrifying thing. It is the equivalent of attending a performance of the Marriage of Figaro at the English National Opera and having to sit next to someone from the marketing department who talks at you throughout:
“Well this bit’s all about when you find out that someone’s been cheating on you.”
“I’m trying to listen–”
“Yeah, but what it is, is the Countess, right…” etc. etc.
Constantly. We are being treated like idiots by an organization that holds one of the most important assets of our age. We are only permitted to understand these things on their terms; terms which cast us as drooling animals who would be made to smile and gurn contentedly if the gallery was emptied entirely of its art and was turned into a massive outlet of Next instead. The home furnishings department of Next is our only comfortable habitat; browsing, slack-jawed amid the leather covered photo frames and pointless bundles of twigs, this is where Tate imagines we are happiest, and so it attempts to replicate it on a bigger and more meaningless scale.
Just consider for a moment the process of thought that must have occurred to produce those thirty-three offensive, little words:
Tate Britain displays British art from 1500 to today. Yes, it’s a big museum, but it’s also like a big living room. All those works of art are yours.
Create your own collection.
The first sentence I have only minor problems with, it tells us at least what Tate Britain is, just incase it is mistaken for a massage parlour, or a kebab house. There is of course a necessity to do this, as the word Gallery or Museum have been dropped from the title, lest they be thought too old-fashioned. But the wise marketing bod at Tate, realises that we might see through their ruse, realises that we might throw our hands up in horror at the prospect of being tricked into going to a museum, so they confess their crime:
“Yes,” they tell us, “it is a big museum…” You were right all along! There is no fooling you! But it’s okay… you won’t find it too taxing, because: “it’s also like a big living room.” You big simpering dullard. You fat, drooling heathen. It’s okay, here’s the experience in terms that you might possibly understand, you stupid-headed ape… it’s also like a big living room. You understand what they are, for fuck’s sake. You have got one yourself, hung with massive reproductions of Rothko paintings that you bought in Ikea. Its just like Ikea, only you can’t buy these pictures; except in a really wanky, metaphorical way you can, because they kind of belong to you anyway. Now pick your designated category; you’re either a binge-drinker, an adulterer, or a simpleton who is only able to form associations with one colour, and fuck off into the café and buy yourself a coffee, you piss-witted ignoramus.
This is what Tate thinks of us. This is the main means of guided interpretation in Tate Britain at present. Make of it what you will. The Calming Collection which liberally makes light of mental health issues, informs me that I am to buy camomille tea from the café. It also tells me that I am to find Jacob Epstein’s sculpture of Iris Beerbohm Tree, calming. Whether I interpret it to be calming or not, this is the right answer. This is not hands-free, anonymous curatorship as Tate would like us to believe it is, with its anonymity of design and labelling; this is Tate forcing a banal and in many ways offensive viewpoint into my head. It is telling me that there is one way to understand art, from this therapeutic, narrative-based stance that might be fine in the throwaway sections of a Sunday newspaper, but is damaging the reception of its collection for its current audience.
And with that I am going to the woods, with my shoe. Imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever. Now imagine Tate wearing that boot.
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