WHAT THE DUCK?

‘Rubber Duck’, like its maker Florentjin Hofman’s other work, is daft, kitsch, intellectually undemanding and entirely uncool. Yet its value, I think, lies in precisely these attributes. When was the last time the work of any artist celebrated on the front cover of Art Review or Frieze aroused general excitement, civic pride, despair at the prospect of it going away, or “limitless amounts of joy”? This last comment is from a discussion at the governmental level about the widespread positive fallout from Hofman’s avowed attempt to spread this joy. I certainly don’t think art can be or should be uniformly subjected to tests of popularity or popularism, but I also think that somebody except the artist and their friends should care about and connect with an art work.

Until recently the 16m tall duck was floating between Hong Kong island and Kowloon. Although described by the artist as a contemporary art work, which it is, the duck was brought to Hong Kong by a shopping mall as a promotional stunt. It’s very healthy that absolutely nobody seems at all interested in the sponsors and that the artist and his duck have gained far more publicity and kudos than the mall.

I say “until recently” because the joy came to an abrupt end when this happened:

And it happened amid accusations of cigarette attacks by mainland China’s notoriously uncouth, vulgar tourists, the enmity of “duck haters” (yes, really) and various other conspiracy theories of the kind that run wild on Sina Weibo and its ilk whenever they get going on any subject even tangentially involving relations between Hong Kong and China. The most likely genuine explanation is environmental stress from the wind and waves, although the eventual face-saving Chinese style explanation was planned maintenance, i.e. “no, no, it’s not a PR disaster, we meant to do it.”

People had been coming from hundreds of miles away to see it, with a collateral commercial impact on everyone from street hawkers with yellow bath ducks (almost certainly made in neighbouring Shenzhen, the world’s factory) to hotels offering “duck view” hotel rooms. Rubber Duck’s untimely demise left many locals as jocularly or genuinely distraught as the Weibo user who wrote ”Don’t die! I still haven’t had the chance to make a pilgrimage and come worship you, big yellow duck.”

Now let’s try to imagine anybody apart from their friends who work as curators or at art magazines giving a single, tiny fuck about the joyous arrival or the sad premature departure of absolutely any of the formulaic work done recently by critical young darlings like Haroon Mirza, Karla Black or Elizabeth Price who can apparently do no wrong…

…

…

OK, put down your pens, time is up. Anything? No, me neither.

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:

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.

“ANYONE CAN DO IT”

From ‘Paint by Number’ by William L. Bird, Jr, published by the Smithsonian/Princeton Architectural Press, 2001.

“ANYONE CAN DO IT” THE LADY PAINTING THIS PICTURE IS NOT A PAINTER. JUST PUT COLOR NO.17 IN SECTION NUMBERED 17 ETC. IT’S AS SIMPLE AS THAT. SURPRISE YOUR FRIENDS WITH A BEAUTIFUL OIL PAINTING ON CANVAS PAINTED BY YOU. THEY CAN BE WASHED WITH SOAP AND WATER.

A lady (not a painter) demonstrates paint by number sets at a trade show, 1953. The oxymoronic “this painter is not a painter” reminds me of Magritte:

Rene Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1948.

Ceci n’est pas un artiste… Also from 1953, this Woolworth’s Annual Report image:

I like the artist’s get up, especially the huge and completely unnecessary blue bow. I might try to put this outfit together, next time I have to appear in public and talk about being an artist.

I’m sure coulrophobes will appreciate me pointing out the lovely John Wayne Gacy clown painting, top right. NB: anyone who paints sailing ships may not be a serial killer but they are definitely mental.

PARKER HARRIS MATHS

Parker Harris is “one of the leading visual arts consultancies in the UK“, responsible for a number of well-known schemes or competitions including the Jerwood Drawing Prize and, er… the Sunday Times Watercolour Competition. Most of them require an entry fee, and the fact that these competitions proliferate and stick around is de facto proof that they’re a nice little earner. So for the next few minutes let me be your Countdown-era Carol Vorderman (minus the sketchy ads for predatory debt consolidation companies who put people’s homes at risk, the sketchy ads for fish oil, etc, ad nauseum) as we do the maths on the “opportunities for artists” currently on offer.