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?

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.

SHENZHEN

It was slightly surreal to read one of Guy Delisle‘s other books about being a temporary resident among famished, fearful citizens in an oppressive Communist country (Pyongyang) while I was a temporary resident sitting among beautiful, healthy Scandinavians in an extravagantly equipped, wonderfully comfortable and relaxed public library in über liberal and progressive Norway. It was in some ways even more surreal to read more recently his similar graphic memoir about working as an animation director in the Chinese city of Shenzhen and to realise that he’d had almost identical experiences and reactions to the place as myself. I don’t mean I identified with it. I mean he had exactly the same experiences as I did. Delisle was there in the late 1990s and I was there ten years later in 2007-2008, but surprisingly little seems to have changed. Probably a lot more buildings went up, and the metro system wasn’t there, and the population was smaller, but I could still even recognise some of the places from his drawings. I was there as an artist in residence at a gallery in Shenzhen, one of the few state-funded ones in the whole of China.

Delisle mentions the occasional blessed escapes to nearby Hong Kong where it feels like a massive weight has lifted from yourself and from everybody else; the fine Communist art of doing the absolute minimum amount of work (or less if you can get away with it), what’s called in Russian tufta; the pathological Chinese aversion to the sun, “as if it’s radioactive” to use Delisle’s perceptive phrase; the worrying amount of time you spend, with hindsight, laying on your bed in your underwear doing nothing, just for some respite from the dirt and the difficulty and from people randomly shouting HELLOO at you on the street when it’s clearly a kind of racist dig rather than a genuine greeting. I experienced all this too. When I finished this book I just wanted to give him a big hug and tell him with relief that it was OK, somebody understands, I felt exactly the same.

THE AXIS OF GOOD (STUFF)

The artists’ database Axis is twenty-one years old. One of their chosen top twenty-one Axis things from the past twenty-one years is a brief extract that was published there last year from my book Career Suicide, (you should buy it here) about the hypocrisy and general twattishness of comfortably salaried people at fully funded arts organisations or supposedly “commercial” galleries always expecting artists to work for no pay, with no resources and to no particular benefit for the artist… and worse still, taking it for granted that they will. Worst of all, many artists take it for granted as well and go along with this kind of nonsense. As I put it in the Axis headline: somebody always pays for “free” (and usually that somebody is you). Telltale Career Suicide logo at the bottom left, click there!

Axis (promptly) pays the people who write these things, incidentally, making them one of the few good ones. I haven’t read all twenty of the others yet, but those I have read so far are interesting and informative so I think they’re worth you checking them out.

Hey, I got through this whole thing without making my traditional joke about WWII, setting up puppet states in Italy and Manchuria, having meetings with Mussolini, etc… oh, wait.

http://www.axisweb21.org

THE CENTURY

This is the 100th post on my Career Suicide blog. Although I’d like more comments and public interaction, I understand that the divide-and-rule climate of paranoia in contemporary art (and the fact that many important art world figures are extremely nasty, vindictive pieces of work) makes people afraid of even being seen as a fellow traveller of the few who speak out, let alone of speaking up for themselves and putting their name to a criticism. Instead of dealing with the problems, the entrenched elites of the art world make people who talk about the problems into the problems. I’ve heard he’s difficult.

A friend asked me a while ago if it really had been career suicide to publish the book, and then to go further in some ways in the writing of this blog. Other people have asked me the same thing. My answer is always an immediate no. If anything, I’ve had new opportunities, made new friendships and gained unexpected (and in some cases art world influential) supporters.

And obviously I see the site logs, I get the emails, people buy the book, people accost me at events when they find out who I am and they thank me for saying what was on their mind. So I have the powerful comfort of knowing there are thousands of people out there– artists included– who are the silent fellow travellers, the ones who agree with me that contemporary art can be exciting, well-made, intelligent, vital, disturbing, enlightening, beautiful and all manner of other good things that connect with the experiences and the interior lives of a broad spectrum of people… but only when it’s free from the deathly grip of curator egos, vested interests, academic mummery, artists’ vanity, bullshit, and the orthodox art world’s general deference and sycophancy to the rich and immoral, who not only expect this sycophancy but actually require it from their pet artists. I’m not alone, I’m not wrong, and neither are most of the people who follow me… if only some of the snobs who are dug in at the pinnacles would deign to listen.

I was also asked recently what I thought the solution was to these gatekeepers getting in our way, these people who think they can still decide everything about who is an approved and adopted artist, and what kinds of work these artists get to show. I said fuck the gatekeepers, and the gates. Go around the back and climb the walls. Better still, bulldoze straight through those walls and make sure they can never be repaired. Let other people pour through the breach behind you.

We’re tired of celebrity artists whose artistic expression and product– because that’s what they’re making, product– has no more depth, value or meaning than their counterparts’ appearances on a reality TV show. We’ve had enough of the same tired little roster of Frieze-endorsed charlatans running through their limited repertoire of modernist gestures that owe everything to the narrow canon of what a few dozen people have decided Fine Art was from the 1930s to the 1970s, and having very little contact with real contemporary life or thought. We’re sick of artists being the least important, worst paid and most abused workers in the art world. For as long as we’ve been truly human, artists have been with us and they’ve been seeing the things that other people don’t, expressing their insights in ways that other people can’t. Art wasn’t invented to go on a Saudi princeling’s wall, to whitewash the brand of car manufacturers or petrochemical companies, or to be collected like knick knacks at the whim of idle trophy wives who are mainly laundering their oligarch husband’s blood money anyway. Art is not frivolous or a consumer commodity; it’s one of the parts of human nature that at its best truly takes us beyond the animal and makes us both human and humane, and helps us to understand all our sisters and brothers in the human race.

Death to the white cube. Long live the new art.