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.”

UNKNOWN PLEASURES

ICE AGE ART: ARRIVAL OF THE MODERN MIND, BRITISH MUSEUM, LONDON, 7th FEBRUARY-23rd MAY 2013

The oldest known articulated figure, from central Europe in the Ice Age, carved from mammoth ivory.

My review of Ice Age Art at the British Museum goes like this: it’s interesting, go and see it. The British Museum is one of my favourite museums in the world anyway; how could it not be when it’s full of all the brilliant stuff we plundered from around the world while we had an empire and we could get away with it? Their little Ice Age video installation is quite poor, though. Provincial Chinese museum of Communist art level of quality. Seriously, British Museum, I’m a professional and I do that kind of thing for a living: email me. Or at least contact somebody who knows what they’re doing.

ZOMBIES OF WESTON-SUPER-MARE

Oh dear: another day, another informant, another so-called art gallery with their hand out to artists for money: The Lloyd Gill Gallery. Although sketchy website design, rampant typos, bad syntax, dodgy. Punctuation And random Capitalisation are par for the course with these people, I fear in this case that the whole project may truly be the work of somebody who’s genuinely mentally unwell or somewhere on the autistic spectrum, so I can’t bring myself to be too harsh. For reasons that will become clear, I also fear that Mr Gill might pursue me with an axe like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. I’ll try to restrict myself to enumerating some of the reasons why I personally would not want anything to do with this gallery.

Reason 1. It’s in Weston-Super-Mare. I’ve nothing particularly against backwaters because I live in a backwater too, but I don’t delude myself that my living room is a commercial gallery.

Reason 2. This photo:

Fawlty Towers + HP Lovecraft = The League of Gentlemen <=> This picture of Lloyd Gill Gallery.  This is a local gallery for local people. Don’t touch or covet the precious things of the local gallery. The wonky writing on the sign is highly reminiscent of Basil Fawlty’s deranged follies and of the titles from the show, which every week featured a new, mischievous anagram of Fawlty Towers on the hotel’s sign. Here are my suggestions for LGG:

GOLLY ALLERGY HELL LTD

THEY’LL DRY ILLEGAL LOG

DAILY GEL HELL TRILOGY

DRILL EGG, YELL TALLY HO

LETHAL LEGGY LILY LORD

YELL LETHALLY, DOG GIRL

LIGHT LAGER DOLLY YELL

WERNICKE’S APHASIA

…IS A NEUROLOGICAL DISORDER, NOT A BLUEPRINT FOR YOUR PRESS RELEASES

Human brains have two small but important regions named for their respective discoverers. Broadly speaking, Broca’s area processes the syntax of language (i.e. its structure and form), while Wernicke’s area is for semantics (i.e. language comprehension and meaning). Wernicke and Broca work with each other, with structures like the angular gyrus for abstractions of language and interactions of syntax and semantics, and of course with the brain as a whole. There’s a lot that’s still unknown about how it all functions and why, but what is well known is that damage to Broca’s area can lead to a person’s speech being halting and fragmented, a bit like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Pumping Iron. Damage to Wernicke’s area, on the other hand, creates a form of aphasia in which Broca’s area and the rest of brain keeps playing by the rules of syntax but the resulting language is meaningless. The best comparison is to a spambot or chatbot, software which can generate texts that mostly make sense without any intelligence or understanding of meaning whatsoever.

Valid syntax but gibberish content, as in Noam Chomsky’s famous example “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously”? Sounds like a pretty succinct and accurate description of about half of the conference papers, artist statements and gallery press releases I ever read in my whole career. I could provide numerous examples that I’ve written about on this blog, without even needing to go elsewhere– although I could just as easily do that and find some egregious examples of artspeak within minutes, if not seconds. Anyway, some examples of the worst artspeak that I’ve castigated here on this blog. They’re all real, and they’re all apparently serious. Try to fight the urge to commit homicide and/or suicide after you’ve read these:

“… a speculative aesthetics of discovery, which is contemplated, interpreted and distorted through the space-time vortex of a mimetic mirror. When the space is not delineated, it is its attempted discoveries which give rise to projects.”

“This is a sort of Schwittersian accumulation of material and void that subsequently creates different spatial architectures – connections. Pure, at first sight simple, spontaneous and rough interventions – gestures (situate, bend down, put, attach, move, cut off) create plasticity of surfaces.”

“… an experimental, rarefied field for the art exhibition which collapses form (the collectivity requisite of the Chain and any performative work) and content (collective consciousness).”

“… exquisitely detailed aesthetic forms hovering between energy and mass.”

“… an instance of collapse to an oblique point of fact, a known feeling… The hook looks like a lemniscate but it feels like a ball bearing… It is in the gap between these understandings and their relentless riffing, where (the artist who wrote this shit)’s drawings take shape and its narratives unfold.”

Even more here, if you think your poor, battered Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas can stand it:

http://careersuicideblog.wordpress.com/tag/english-lesson

http://careersuicideblog.wordpress.com/tag/press-releases

ONE OF THESE IS ART: CHRIS MARKER / REDDIT CREEPSHOTS

CHRIS MARKER, SELECTED WORKS 1957-2011, LOUISE BLOUIN FOUNDATION, 9 OCTOBER–3 NOVEMBER 2012

Dozens of furtive, objectifying, fetishistic pictures taken of women in public places without their knowledge or consent apparently constitutes an art exhibition to some people. Except when they’re on Reddit in the currently super-controversial Creepshots (i.e. the place where men post furtive, objectifying, fetishistic pictures taken of women in public places without their knowledge or consent) in which case they’re just weird fapping material for a few, but exceedingly problematic and distasteful to nearly everybody else. I will again state my belief that not everything an artist does is necessarily art, even if they themselves claim it as such. I will also recommend not looking at the parts of Reddit where things like Creepshots– and far, far worse– are nurtured and validated.

This exhibition at Artinfo/Modern Painters oligarch Louise Blouin’s art space in west London– in the contemporary silo gallery style, and therefore consisting mostly of white paint, cavernous wasted space and the flinty eyes of sullen gallery maids peeping out above oppressively high white cuboids– was presumably in the pipeline long before Marker snuffed it earlier this year. But one can’t help thinking that Passengers (AKA Creepshots) being flagged as his last work possibly indicates that if he’d lived he might have had the sense to think again about showing work that could literally be printouts from Reddit, both in terms of subject matter and the (very low) quality of the images themselves. There’s also some truly horrible Photoshop work to be seen on the prints of images he took in North Korea in the 50s; pretty clearly, he didn’t ‘shop them during the Korean War, so again somebody seems to have been making bad decisions on behalf of an artist who’s obviously no longer in a position to police how his work gets shown.

I’m actually a huge, nerdily knowledgeable fan of Marker’s films and installations. Static pictures on walls seem almost irrelevant to any survey of his work. La Jetée, his most famous work, drives this point home. It’s made of still images, but it’s the montage and the journey through time diegetically and structurally that makes these still images work. As contextless still individual images, most of them have little relevance , interest or meaning. Obviously the mainstream art business is still for the most part about having things to hang on walls, even if the artist is primarily a film maker or a performer, and so film makers and performers who want to get on make token things to go on walls, and so other artists have to do the same, and so it goes on. This exhibition is absolutely dominated by still images, a perverse state of affairs for an artist who expressed himself most and best through moving ones. An installation plonked almost as an afterthought near the doorway gives a glimpse of the real Marker with intensely edited and exquisitely structured fragments from silent movies and old stock footage, but Blouin is apparently of the orthodox view that we don’t deserve seating or any other form of comfort to experience long-form video art.

Seriously, people, the room must be at least 20m x 20m. You have space for a few damn chairs.