TLDNU*

(*Too long, did not understand.)

Either I just succumbed to some kind of reading disorder, or the reliably daft e-artnow list has delivered another payload of grade-A twaddle. I’ll make some allowances for Bildfrost (“Frozenness”) being an exhibition at a German gallery, but on the other hand although I’m pretty confident that I speak German I’d still want to run my German press release past somebody who was a native speaker to make sure I wasn’t making ein Arsch of myself.

I’ll just pull out the silliest phrases and paragraphs at random from what is quite a lengthy screed, but trust me: it all makes about as much sense out of context as it does in context, i.e. virtually none. There’s also a lot of telling us what we’d be able to see with our eyes if we could see the art, which is redundant, patronising and controlling if we intend to see the art and usually baffling if we can’t see the art and probably never will.

BILDFROST (“Frozenness”)

“Initially, the picture seals itself off from the interpretation of any impression. An oscillating flurry emits from the center that steers the anticipation of a disappearing space into darkness. At the same time, it becomes clear that the fabric of colors is the result of picturesque grid structures. Has large pixilated photography been translated into painting or is the painting imitating a print? The understanding of the romantic image remains a wanting. The work resists any outsider’s demand to understand and requires an active positioning of the viewer. A motive between figurative speech and reflections on media.”

IMAGINARY ARTISTS VI: MOORE

Although horror comics and Tales from the Crypt were very American artefacts, 1973′s Vault of Horrors was a very British sub-Hammer luvvie-fest starring the likes of Denholm Elliott, Anna Massey and Terry-Thomas… and yes, in the picture above that’s a pre-Doctor Who but already bug-eyed bonkers Tom Baker playing a deranged artist called Moore in the segment called Drawn and Quartered. “Deranged artist”, he writes, as if there’s any other kind. OK, more deranged and irrational than usual. More deranged, irrational and dangerous even than Tracey Emin, because Moore has a special magic voodoo painting hand. Moore doesn’t seem to have a first name, so let’s call him Tom since Tom Baker blesses us with a fairly good dose of Tom Bakerness in this film.

Tom is cheated when his scumbag gallerist Diltant nicks his paintings and sells them off for a huge profit in cahoots with a crooked critic and a dodgy dealer, while Tom remains penniless and uncelebrated. Also bitter, obviously. Again, I say these things as if there’s any other kind of gallerist, critic or dealer… only joking!

Scumbags.

Tom sets out to do do that voodoo that he do’s so well and exact his revenge. It’s a bit like a lowbrow, badly-dressed and greasy-haired 70s nod to The Picture of Dorian Gray, since whatever Tom does to portraits of these wrong ‘uns manifests itself in real life.

Denholm Elliott: scumbag.

IMAGINARY ARTISTS V: JOKER

“I kind of like this one, Bob. Leave it.”

 

“Barbed wire is the medium of the future, Mrs. Russelmeier… but that is no way to make a banana.” The Joker, 1966.

Two 1966 episodes of the Batman TV series– itself a masterpiece of Pop Art and camp– overtly call out to Pop Art and the (then) contemporary abstract expressionists with Pop Goes The Joker/Flop Goes The Joker, in which the eponymous lunatic vandalises an art gallery. When one of the artists whose works have been permanently wrecked with splashes of paint actually likes it and appreciates that their value’s been increased (“All I could ever draw was stupid looking farm boys”– a sly but spot-on dig at Norman Rockwell), the Joker wastes no time in getting himself into Gotham City’s art world. He starts by winning an art competition against the likes of Jackson Potluck, Pablo Pinkus, and a paint flinging monkey. After an all-too-accurate satirical  exhibition of what would generally be referred to as their “practice”, the Joker paints the prizewinning artwork; a tiny mauve dot on a blank canvas. One of the judges, however, notes that “I kind of like what the monkey did…”

In fact both episodes are packed with great quips or mordant observations about the general perception of contemporary art and artists. Some of them still strike a nerve, especially the Joker’s fraudulent art school (Joker: “Sorry, millionaires only, please.” Millionaire Bruce Wayne, after being instantly accepted: “Aren’t you going to give me a test to see if I have any talent?”), the crit session where anything can be justified and Bruce is castigated for earnestly sculpting fruit, and the art dealer surreptitiously upping the price tag of a painting by $2500 when Alfred expresses an interest on behalf of the millionaire Bruce Wayne.

As a bonus, both episodes are also packed with people in smocks and berets, and they get beaten up by Batman and Robin.  They’re generally just daft and fun to watch, as well. You remember fun, don’t you? It’s the thing that was completely forbidden and absent in Christopher Nolan’s pompous, pretentious iterations of Batman recently. “Why so serious?” indeed. Joker could be addressing Nolan and Christian Bale directly when he sums up the real appeal of Batman in Pop… “What can you expect from a man who appears in public in such a ridiculous outfit?” You can go dark with Batman and the Joker– Alan Moore, Frank Miller and Grant Morrison’s writing for these characters effectively if somewhat inadvertently provoked the whole dark and gritty superhero orthodoxy of the past twenty years, almost on their own– but the pair remain essentially daft fantasy figures and not realistic as human beings, despite or perhaps even because of their psychological and narrative potency.

Tim Burton’s brief recapitulation of Pop Goes The Joker, in the first of the 80s/90s cycle of Batman films, is clearly somewhat darker even though it still features comedy berets. And it’s inexplicably soundtracked by an incongruous, mediocre Prince song that has nothing to do with anything, but let’s ignore that for now. Joker and his cronies once again vandalise an art gallery. This time Degas and Rembrandt, among others, get a Joker détournement intervention. The Flugelheim Museum’s collection of Classical sculptures is smashed, or they get green hair and red lipstick. Only Francis Bacon is to Joker’s taste. The film’s an absolute bloody mess in almost every way except for its stunning techno-gothic-deco production design, but again there are a few sharply observed little details. Immediately following the destruction of the Flugelheim’s art works– and after gassing most of its patrons, possibly fatally– the Joker meets with photographer/journalist/Kim Basinger/eye candy/whatever Vicky Vale. I’ve always loved the way Jack Nicholson goes through her portfolio of trendy stuff, barely looking at any of it and dismissing every page with, “crap, crap, crap, crap…”; I’ve often been tempted to do the same with portfolios and in art galleries. Eventually he finds some photos of murder victims that he approves of. Fortunately I’ve never done that with somebody’s portfolio.

Nicholson’s Joker also has a bit where he portrays himself as a kind of outsider artist who’s just prepared to go that little bit further and mutilate or kill his public if necessary. “I make art until somebody dies.” This ties in nicely with the deranged intensity and strange obsessions of some real world artists, and with the Joker’s own fascinating imaginary psychology as a man who doesn’t think there’s any such thing as a joke that’s gone too far.

Under the break you can watch both episodes in full, and a clip of the Joker obviously having a profound influence upon the young Banksy at the Flugelheim:

IMAGINARY ARTISTS IV: HALLWARD

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In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement and gave rise to so many strange conjectures.

As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. But he suddenly started up, and closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake.

“It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done,” said Lord Henry languidly. “You must certainly send it next year to the Grosvenor. The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse. The Grosvenor is really the only place.”

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891.

“All art is quite useless.”

Oscar Wilde, in the introduction to the same novel.

Amazingly, the Royal Academy is still too large and too vulgar. Lord Henry also gives a perfect description of the art private view that’s still valid today. Published in a magazine in 1890, then in revised and expanded form as a novel in 1891, Wilde’s book managed to be perfectly scandalous without ever spelling anything out. It was clear to most people, however, that the painter Basil Hallward’s passion for the beautiful young Dorian Gray was a long way from being platonic. Hallward fears that he’s put too much of himself into the eponymous painting, in both an artistic sense and by way of outing himself, but it’s Dorian’s soul that’s laid bare in it after he is mysteriously granted the vain wish that his perfect portrait would age and suffer while Dorian himself remains unblemished.

Wilde is seriously fuzzy when it comes to Basil and Dorian’s timelines, but at some point presumably circa 1875– after Hallward handed the portrait over to Dorian and after it had begun to manifest signs of Dorian’s moral decay, but before there was a large discrepancy between Dorian’s age/appearance and the painting– Dorian stabbed Hallward to death in an act of displaced guilt and anger. Of course only a few years on from 1891 Wilde was embroiled in his own homosexual melodrama, one that led to his own all too real social and physical ruin.

The picture(s) at the top are from the 1945 film version of the book, the only adaptation I’ve seen that’s not absolutely bloody disastrous. They were painted by a real working artist, the American Ivan Albright. There have been a number of other adaptations featuring Basil Hallward and/or his muse Dorian Gray, but discussing them would probably involve talking about the abominable film version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and nobody wants that.

IMAGINARY ARTISTS III: WARHOL

Even the “real” Andy Warhol was a fictional character, a fastidiously maintained Pop Art costume and distancing apparatus worn throughout his adult life by the lad from Pittsburgh formerly known to his Slovakian parents as Andrej Varhola Jr. After he was nearly shot to death by Valerie Solanas in 1968 it was almost as if the last vestiges of any real person really had died that day; all that remained was the character. On the rare occasions when he spoke of it at all, Warhol more or less admitted this was the case. He sometimes spoke of seeing himself as if he were a character on television.

Within a few years of his death in 1987 Andy Warhol started to appear as a character in numerous films and TV shows, including some (Austin Powers and Watchmen, for example) where he amounts to not much more than a kind of set dressing, a shorthand way of placing the action in trendy New York in the 1960s. IMDB lists a startling thirty appearances of the character since 1991. This means there were some years where Warhol was a character in several films simultaneously. I’m almost certain there are others that aren’t yet listed on IMDB or never would be because they’re outside its remit: TV dramas or feature films from non-Anglophone countries, adverts, comedy shows, pop videos, and so on.

Please enjoy this small gallery of Andys. I haven’t seen I Shot Andy Warhol for years though I seem to recall it being fairly good, but some of these films are bloody atrocious. Most of the ones I haven’t seen look pretty bad as well. I noticed that he’s frequently depicted with his work; this is true in five of the eight stills shown on this page alone. Perhaps it’s an unconscious realisation that the character of the real-world Andy Warhol himself was also in some sense as much a work of art, and of artifice, as his famous soup cans or his screenprints of Marilyn.

(Far too) animated Andy Warhol (voice by Hank Azaria) in The Simpsons, 1999.

Jared Harris as Andy Warhol in I Shot Andy Warhol, 1996.

David Bowie as Andy Warhol, Basquiat, 1996. To quote Andy Warhol in many of his interviews: “Um… No.”

Guy Pearce as Andy Warhol, Factory Girl, 2006.

Bill Hader as Andy Warhol, Men in Black 3, 2012. I did warn you that some of these films were shit.

Andy Warhol (voice by David Herman) in Futurama, 2011, talking to Zoidberg in a cravat and wig.

Bob Swain as Andy Warhol, Death Becomes Her, 1992. With Zoidberg in a wig again, sorry I mean Marilyn Monroe. I see what you did there, director of Death Becomes Her.

Greg Travis as Andy Warhol, Watchmen, 2009. Watchmen Pop Art in the background.