THE ORA… THE ORA…

Ten international galleries want you, like a vampire bat wants sleeping cattle. Premio Ora (“Premium Hours”) says that the “basic registration fee required as partial coverage for organizational expenses” is €60 to enter three art works for consideration. Poor things, only covering their organisational expenses partially. Each additional image after the first three is only €5 and luckily for them you, it’s possible to enter an unlimited number of works.

Yes, it’s another sketchy “opportunity” for artists to enter a competition where they pay for the remote opportunity of possibly getting an unpaid gallery show, i.e. something that an artist should usually be paid for, or at the very least should not have to pay for in order to be considered. I’m providing links here for the purpose of verification; I wouldn’t suggest visiting any of them unless you want to know which international galleries are involved in this farrago and I would therefore recommend in the strongest possible terms that you don’t ever have any dealings with whatsoever.

A bona fide artist who is having an exhibition at an art gallery is not a “winner” and does not pay all the costs of transporting and exhibiting their work. Any artist who does so is a customer, and they should have their service– i.e. in this case their work shown in the gallery for two weeks– provided to them without quibbles and without all this pretence of meritocratic selection or curatorial oversight.

RECYCLING

I’m working on writing a report-slash-compendium of wisdom for artists based on the research and interviews we’ve been doing at one of my other ventures: Market Project. This has meant going through all the files and posts on that site, and in the process I’ve rediscovered some excellent posts there by an absolutely brilliant writer called Alistair Gentry. Therefore, like all lazy bloggers at the end of the year, I’ll be recycling some of these posts here over the Christmas and New Year period. I know everyone’s going to be on the internet as normal because everyone just is, always. They’ll just be a bit drunker than normal. I hope you enjoy these automated posts of old shit from another site, dear drunk and hating your family already readers.

ANTHEA HAMILTON: SORRY I’M LATE (I’M SORRY I WENT)

Firstsite, Colchester, 8th September-25th November 2012

How the hell does somebody who makes such dim, shallow, repetitive and pointless work get such a big show? Oh… she’s been in Frieze. Mystery solved. Frieze seems to be all Firstsite cares about, because they appear not to care that there’s usually a ratio of about 10 staff to every visitor; there was exactly one other visitor when I was there at lunchtime; a period when a large public gallery should by rights be full of people even if they’re just passing, curious, getting out of the rain or killing time. This other visitor looked like a professional on her lunch break, but she was obviously bewildered and left quickly. Every alienating, vapid exhibition like this escalates the already sky-high resentment, disconnection and mistrust that still constantly swirl around Firstsite’s arrival in the town and in the east of England generally, whose flagship gallery it’s meant to be. I only sat on a bench outside for five minutes and I heard three passing pedestrians opine about how much they hated it.

The artist herself is present as an endless loop of babbling, random, artspeak Tourette’s syndrome on a wall monitor, with– yes– her Frieze cuttings in a file below. It seems the curator had a bit of wobble and realised that the exhibition was all over the place and mostly incomprehensible.  Nice try, everybody, but this video isn’t helping. I actually found it highly entertaining and engaging for entirely the wrong reasons and I had a really good laugh at it (or rather, at her). I have to thank Hamilton for that, at least. And to be fair, she seems to be the first artist to find some viable way to actually show art on Firstsite’s intensely stupid and art-hostile sloping walls, even though it’s just giant wallpaper decals of John Travolta’s head. I don’t know what John Travolta has to do with anything, but he reappears as a screensaver in the foyer as well. Again, credit to Hamilton for calling a screensaver a screensaver instead of doing a Tacita Dean and claiming it as art.

OUT OF FOCUS: PHOTOGRAPHY

SAATCHI GALLERY, LONDON, 25th APRIL-22nd JULY 2012

Generally speaking I would say that Saatchi’s taste in painting, sculpture and installation art (or perhaps more accurately that of whichever of his lickspittles are tasked with handling the aforementioned) is absolutely bloody horrendous. I don’t think I can ever forgive him for the YBAs, among quite a large number of other things for which I also can’t forgive him. But I actually rather enjoyed a lot of the work in this exclusively photographic exhibition.

Katy Grannan’s heroic, dignified portraits of raddled, freaky Californian lowlives deserve their reverential presentation; Sohei Nishono’s composite, subjective, experiential dioramas of New York, Paris and Tokyo are fascinating; I love the simplicity of concept but complexity of texture in Andreas Gefeller’s photomerged top-down views of artists’ studios; Leonce Raphael Agbodjélou’s portraits of Yoruba spirit guides from Benin in their bizarre, gaudy costumes are surreal and elegant; Mikhael Subotsky’s photos from what looks like an almost apocalyptically bleak town in South Africa are beautiful and devastating. Even the work related to the Google Photography prize is of a pretty high standard.

And then there’s a lot of blurry or gratuitously weirdly-coloured shit, and a significant number of female artists who really want everyone to stare at their tits, or at somebody else’s tits, because it’s like post-feminist, and showing you some tits is like a statement yeah? but there doesn’t seem to be anything anyone can do about this unfortunate phenomenon until we can find and shut down the secret factory that relentlessly manufactures these narcissistic, needy, psychologically damaged, imaginatively impoverished Electra-complex saddos, and then turns at least one of them loose at every single art school in the word.

BURTYNSKY: OIL – MYSTIFYING: TOILETS

THE PHOTOGRAPHERS’ GALLERY, LONDON, 19TH MAY-1ST JULY 2012

The newly re-opened Photographers’ Gallery (or THE PHOႨOGRAPHERS’ GAL˩ERY, to use their own weird, precious typographic rendering) is austere. I could sympathise with the elderly gentleman who couldn’t tell which toilet he could decorously use, because the MALE/FEMALE icons on the doors were so minimalist as to be almost indistinguishable from one another. It may be very cool and designer-approved and politically correct and whatnot, but we just want to have a piss, not decipher vaguely gendered hieroglyphics. Or you could be really modern and just have unisex toilets. I deliberately used the Ladies’ toilet anyway.

I’d like a contemporary art gallery with twiddly bits and decoration everywhere, just for a change. A Laura Ashley chintzy art gallery, or a Dubai gold-plated everything gallery, or a Singapore Tiger Balm Gardens art gallery with protective spirits and minor bureaucratic gods up on the roof and a hundred clashing colours, or a blaring, neon, digital gallery that’s like having a Shinjuku alleyway gaffer taped to your face. I’m sick of minimalist Metropolitan restraint and good taste. It’s boring, not least because all the new silo art spaces that have opened over the past few years are done in exactly the same inhuman style.

On the plus side, Edward Burtynsky’s work is intellectually grounded, aesthetically pleasing despite its ugly subject matter, and deserves to be printed large, presented and lit reverentially in hushed rooms, as it is in this exhibition. Tragic documents of a fucked up era of utterly wrong priorities, silent accusations against the human race for despoiling and abusing our beautiful planet for short-term profit, for fleeting comfort, and occasionally from sheer laziness.

Raqs Media Collective from Delhi are stuck away in the dark in a room off a staircase near the aforementioned toilets, and that’s where they should preferably stay, unseen. Ooh, look, we animated an old photo a little bit. It’s post-colonialist, yah? They probably wouldn’t get away with this crap if they weren’t Indian. Go to the basement shop instead, it’s great. It’s not just photo books, various inevitable Lomo detritus and weird Japanese cameras: you can (and should) buy relatively affordable work by living photographers there, too.