DEUTSCHE BÖRSE PHOTOGRAPHY PRIZE

THE PHOTOGRAPHERS’ GALLERY, LONDON, 18TH APRIL-30TH JUNE 2013

The first thing I noticed, and the reason I went back to The Photographers’ Gallery after boycotting it in disgust last year, is that they seem to have quietly reverted to not charging entry fees for their exhibitions. Victory is mine. When they’re publicly funded and sponsored for exhibitions by the Deutsche Börse and The Telegraph, then it bloody well should be free. They knew I was right, obviously. It’s good to be the king. I wonder what Mr and Mrs Telegraph (retired) think of Mishka Henner scouring Google Street View for itinerant rural prostitutes, though? I suspect they would take a dim view of the whole venture, even if the prostitutes are primly referred to as “sex workers” at the gallery, and described in an even more absurdly PC and “let’s not judge, mmkay?” manner on the web site as “isolated women occupying the margins of southern European environments.” Or maybe Mr Telegraph would be well into it and he might even like to get URLs and grid refs so the dirty Tory pig can check out some of the “isolated women” first hand.

It’s not nice to think that women have to sit in plastic garden chairs by a motorway so some nasty scumbag can come along and buy blow jobs, but get real… it isn’t in any way inaccurate or out of line to call them prostitutes.

Mishka Henner, SS98, Cerignola Foggia, Italy, 2012.

I’d seen Henner’s work before, and I really like the eerie, desolate, and profoundly un-erotic world he’s created with this series of pictures. It reminded me somewhat of David Lynch’s mild obsession with uncanny hookers in odd places, as seen in Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway and Inland Empire, etc.

It’s also very interesting that half the nominees (Henner and Christina De Middel) are showing work that’s completely outside the tiny comfort zone of anybody who still worries that photography is not quite art. Henner’s obviously working with a database of found material in a way that definitely stands on its own feet as art, and De Middel’s work is from a self-published book. It’s a huge step forward to see self-publishing and digital practice acknowledged in this way, even though I also love veteran old school photographer Chris Killip’s monochrome, classically photographer-y, authoritative and didactic pictures of decaying communities in the north of England in the 70s and 80s, as Thatcherism set about destroying what was left of them.

Although– or possibly because– they’re beautifully staged, shot and finished, I have some reservations about De Middel’s work. I doubt she’s being deliberately colonial, but her African astronauts (or “Afronauts“: see what she did there?) look a bit too much like they could be some kind of wilfully quirky and borderline racist fashion shoot for a stupid magazine like Wallpaper*. Quirky and racist. “Quiracist”. To get a bit pompous and sociologist-like in the mode that I mocked in the first paragraph, there’s something a bit othering and hegemonic about the way this body of work seems to be suggesting that the idea of Africans in space is inherently odd, funny or inconceivable, even if The Afronauts is partially based on Zambia’s real and fairly inept attempts at space flight.

In the real world I passed on quickly from Broomberg and Chanarin’s War Primer 2, and I’ll do the same here. Brecht, war is hell, pasting over somebody else’s work, incredibly ugly artist’s book, Google, something, something. Basic art school stuff: very dated, very dull (or “dullted”). What’s it doing here?

COME TO DADA

I want your souuuuuuuuuul… and a £25 submission fee, and a massive commission fee, and some other fees that are hidden in the small print, and…

I’ve been helping several correspondents do detective work on some artist farming businesses who’ve tried to pick them up recently. My definition of artist farming is taking money from artists for vaguely defined services or for promises of success or sales that are deceptive and otherwise not as advertised. These schemes and businesses promise a lot but usually achieve little or nothing positive for the artist; they may indeed damage an artist’s credibility and their prospects of being taken seriously. They certainly don’t have the interests of artists or art buyers at heart in any way. All they care about is milking as many naive marks as possible. In Britain the same little pack of bandits seems to have about 90% of the artist farming business sewn up, they’re all friends with each other and they all co-validate each other’s lies and puffed-up CVs, linking to each other with bogus endorsements, spurious logos, sketchy web sites and narratives of success that don’t hold water.

Since it’s surprisingly quick and easy to get the measure of a company online, I thought I would share some methods to either put your mind at rest that the company is legit and the person you’re dealing with is who and what they say they are… or not, as the case may be. Where so-called “art opportunities” are concerned, the latter usually turns out to be the case.

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 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.

SOUZOU: OUTSIDER ART FROM JAPAN

The Wellcome Trust, London, 28th March–30th June 2013

Shoichi Koga, Seitenmodoki (Ganesha (Nandikeshvara)-oid), 2006.

Having seen this great exhibition of so-called Outsider Art– i.e. art by untrained people in care– I’m more convinced than ever that there’s either an absolutely massive number of respected contemporary artists running around with serious but undiagnosed mental illnesses and learning disabilities… or going to art school, having an MA or a PhD, knowing the right people in the art world, being shown in the “right” [sic] galleries, and being spoken of and approved of in high level critical discourses around contemporary art all signify absolutely bugger all about an artist’s talent or ability in most cases. Because there’s basically no difference between much of the work in Souzou and much of the work to be seen in contemporary art galleries and art fairs all over the developed world. Except possibly there’s a slight difference in the sense that some of the Outsider Art is much better because it completely lacks the cynicism, arid conceptualism, dated Modernist concerns, condescension and sneering pretensions of the Frieze brigade.

Some of the artists in Souzou don’t know, don’t care or perhaps even can’t comprehend how their work is received and understood outside of its original and intensely personal therapeutic context. It doesn’t effect in the slightest their ability to make art that connects with people; art that it beautiful, art that is well-crafted, art that in some way says something to us about our own lives, feelings and thoughts, art that expresses something of the artist’s soul for other people to share, art that is special and desirable enough for somebody to want it on their wall.