The Mystery of the Parrot

In Two Weeks One Summer, Hirst has grappled with what he calls the void of painting to humanise both himself and his art. These paintings are important works in the story because they are an attempt by Hirst to both humanise his art and to show something of himself in his work, to make art as an act of self-expression. Painting is the confrontation of a demon that has simultaneously eluded him and deeply haunted him for his entire career. The duality is an important device for Hirst, since it guides both the aesthetic and the meaning of his art wherein the work is a play on the collision between opposites. The paintings, too, employ a duality, which derives from a literal, embodied fact of the artwork. The duality of the paintings is a conflict between form and content. It is through this lens that the apparent mystery of the parrot can be solved: here form and content come together like never before, since the familiar ideas are slightly obscured by the novelty of their form. The result is that, on the one hand, the artist’s own emotional life is explored in the very act of painting, and on the other hand, this opens the path to an emotional engagement with the work…

…coming soon: a full analysis of The Mystery of the Parrot and the Infinite Void

The Artist for Our Times

Since the opening of Damien Hirst’s retrospective at Tate Modern, we have heard accusations of breathtaking arrogance and fraud on an industrial scale. We have also heard complaints about the one-trick-pony who never makes the work himself, prefers money over art and would rather shock than enlighten his audience. In light of this predictable response, I here reiterate my defence of Hirst. Read more

Remote Control at the ICA

‘Remote Control’ is sobering artistic interrogation of television on the cusp of digital switchover, which uses a variety of media to offer a frankly grim view of television’s influence on society and politics. It offers a grim vision of the world with television, which, although peppered with some good work, ultimately feels too negative, as if we need Baudrillard to come wading in with some primal delight in the hopelessness of it all.

The exhibition begins in the lower gallery with a monumental new installation by Simon Denny. As I walk along the balcony level, the combination of Denny’s restructured analogue transmission hardware stretching the entire length of the space and the visitors sat wearing headphones at a parallel line of TV screens gives the surreal experience of wandering into a subterranean control room. The tangle of wires, bulky metal casings, buttons and leavers of Denny’s piece take us inside and behind television; suddenly the flickering light of the screen is exposed as mere technology, mere electricity, unfurling the glorious magic of the medium. This shattering of illusion sets the tone for the rest of the show.

Artists’ films, including works by Richard Serra and David Hall, are shown on clumpy old screens with a single chair and set of headphones. This means that the works can only be fully viewed by one person at a time: an isolated viewer cuts themselves off from their surroundings to become absorbed in the all-consuming world of the television. Here art is mirroring, even exaggerating, life by bringing into focus the social impact of television as a medium which has the insidious power to simultaneously unite and divide people.

In one sense, the effect of television on societies as conglomerations of individuals is a central theme of the entire show. From Harun Farocki & Andrei Ujica’s Videograms which edits footage of the Romanian revolution to Adrian Piper’s visceral confrontation of racial identity, television is presented as a complex social network of connections and divisions which have not just mapped but determined social history. Piper’s Cornered is particularly interesting because it is more than a film on a screen – it is an installation with an upturned dining table and birth certificates on the wall – making it an absorbing experience, which again echoes the power of television itself.

There is another sense, however, in which the exhibition feels like a protracted protest against television. Richard Serra’s Television Delivers People is a seminal critique of the powers of corporations and advertising that motivate television production to indoctrinate the masses. Even Hilary Lloyd’s characteristically beautiful double-screen, multi-perspective film, Moon, in this context feels like a backhanded attempt to comment on how television disorientates and obscures the world, rather than illuminates it with lunar clarity.

‘Remote Control’ is rich in ideas, offering the opportunity to stand back from the screen and think critically about the impact of television on the course of history, and ultimately to wonder if the switch to digital will make a positive difference. But it is also a grim vision of the world: there is none of the glamour of celebrity or the bling of the television age, only an endless stream of muted ruminations on a near-colourless world of struggle in beams of light that continually, and apparently spuriously, promise redemption.

‘Remote Control’ is at the ICA until 10 June 2012.

Jeremy Deller: Joy in People

It is easy to forget you are at an exhibition as you sit drinking tea in Valerie’s Snack Bar. The awkward plastic chairs fixed to the tables, the hum of the kettle and the unfussy wooden shed construction transport you to Bury Market in this life-size recreation of a simple English café. This galvanises Deller’s Hayward show, and indeed his entire body of work, by illustrating that he is an artist who does not make things so much as he causes happenings.

By staging events and bringing people together, Deller has a singular talent for subverting the concept of art as commodity and putting it to work on capturing moments of joy, disaster and ambition that characterise everyday life. But ‘Joy in People’ is difficult because there is almost nothing to see but masses of content; moreover, you can never pin down exactly who or what Jeremy Deller is.

The artefacts that comprise the exhibition are either recreations of things Deller made before, for some specific purpose, or they are merely documents that serve as an archive for an event he previously staged. It takes a concerted act of will to convince yourself that the thing you are looking at is basically meaningless in itself and is meaningful only as a trace of something else that is long lost in time.

In all the work, however, there is the continual presence of Deller himself; sometimes lurking quietly in the background and sometimes as the creative force driven by neurotic obsession. But the man remains an enigma: he hardly makes any of the work himself, openly confessing to possessing little skill or talent in art-making, he doesn’t have anything to sell, he shows no commitment to a medium or a genre, he works collaboratively but almost never alone, and yet he remains the ghost in the machine.

This feels a lot less like an exhibition than it does like a warehouse where the fragments of a man’s thought processes are stored. Given the lack of traditional notions of the artist’s craft, the artwork as object and even an aesthetic or thematic programme, you cannot take ‘Joy in People’ at face value. It has to be seen as a documentary record of ideas that were realised in fleeting moments, where the things here only make sense in the context of their original inception.

Deller’s appeal resides in precisely the fact that he makes things happen, rather than that he happens to make things. He explores the human condition through engagements with politics, popular culture, everyday life and art itself, but without producing a single thing that is of any value and of only fleeting interest. Rather, he stages events which offer the world to us as a suddenly intelligible phenomenon so that we can scrutinise it anew. It is, for Deller, only in acting that we can be critical and analytical. As such, he is a welcome antidote to practically all the art that normally experience.

The social conscience of Deller’s work is sincere and edifying; he cares, not about art, but about people. He is using art as a means of reaching out to individuals and communities to give them a voice and to take a critical stance on the state of contemporary life. His political works are aimed at opening a conversation, fostering dialogue on the crushing orthodoxy of so-called liberal democracy. For It is what it is, he took the wreckage of a car that had been destroyed in a bomb attack in Baghdad market around America with an Iraqi civilian and a US soldier to stage an ongoing discussion forum about the war. One of his best known works, The Battle of Orgreave, restages a confrontation between striking miners and riot police. Events like these are designed to reignite debates on matters that Deller rightly feels are not historically settled, inviting reconsideration and holding out the dim possibility of reconciliation.

A lighter side is revealed in Deller’s apparent obsession with popular culture, born partly out of his own stunted maturity in living at home until age 31 and partly out of an interest in how people become drawn into the mythology of celebrity. The near blasphemous set up of quotations from Kurt Cobain and Morrissey on replicas of those florescent signs that normally bear biblical quotations on the exteriors of evangelical churches, and the street sign just outside the gallery, reading Brian Epstein died for you, both send up and celebrate the ludicrous notion of rock gods. The Search for Bez is a naive and devotional installation of Deller’s failed efforts to hunt down the Happy Mondays’ icon, while The Uses of Literacy gives a tender, but sometimes disturbing, insight into the world of Manic Street Preachers fandom. These works are less about the celebrities and more about the devotion and faith of those who follow them; they get under the skin of the girl who idolises Richey Edwards or the man who wants to meet Bez in order to begin to uncover the psychology of culture.

Ultimately, whether it is pop music or politics, cafes or brass bands, Deller’s work is a continual exploration of the things people care about. By staging events that provoke and dissect these things, Deller is able the paint a relentless picture of people that is simultaneously a slice of an individual and an overarching comment on the general populace. The most poignant illustration of this guiding principle in Deller’s work is the section titled My Failures: the rejected Fourth Plinth proposal for a statue of Dr David Kelly, the Iggy Pop life drawing class that never happened and the Tube map cover picture of a bicycle harmoniously bring together Deller’s personality in his work and his irrepressible joy in people.

In the end, it makes no difference whether the events Deller thinks up actually happen; the important thing is that he thinks of them at all and for all the right reasons. You walk away from this exhibition with the feeling that you missed a trick every time Deller did one of these events because you were not there, and all you have now is a dim reflection of it all. At the same time, you walk away inspired because Deller is an artist who shuns artworld commodity and convention ends up making a powerful, if paradoxical, statement: stop looking at art and do something.

‘Joy in People’ is at the Hayward Gallery until May 13.

We Need to Talk about Damien

[A rough introduction to The Art of Spectacle]

Damien Hirst presents a curious conundrum. On the one hand, he is one of the most successful contemporary artists alive, with an enormous fortune and works in both private and public collections around the world. On the other hand, he is reviled by the art-viewing public, the media and artists alike, inspiring fury and despair in equal measure. How can a man polarise the artworld and the public so fervently and yet make a success of himself? The time has come to talk seriously about Damien: we need to ignore the hype and look carefully at the work in order to try to see why he is one of our most important contemporary artists.

Hirst project website

Follow my insane Damien Hirst is the Greatest Artist Alive project by visiting the website at: danielbarnes.org/the-art-of-spectacle.

New writings will be collected on the site as well as posted here on my blog. At the moment, it’s early days and there is not much there, but the more I think and the more I look at things, the more I write.

David Hockney: ‘A Bigger Picture’

In a career spanning more than fifty years, David Hockney has always painted his immediate environment with palpable affection and unparalleled flair, so it is no surprise that his homecoming has inspired yet another burst of creative energy in response to the landscape of his forefathers. ‘A Bigger Picture’ is at once a departure from Hockney’s youthful sun-kissed glamour and a return to a thoughtful engagement with the tradition of landscape painting. The result is not beyond criticism, but it is a fascinating chapter in Hockney’s story.

The Wrong Kind of Spots

This is a photograph of the wall of the southbound platform at Pimlico Underground station. It shows a geometrical arrangement of spots that are reminiscent of Damien Hirst’s spot paintings, but they are the wrong kind of spots. Consideration of precisely why they are the wrong kind of spots reveals an insight into the nature of the spot paintings.

Initially we observe that the spots are all the same colour and they decrease in size from left to right; moreover, they are painted straight onto the tiled wall, with one in the centre of each tile. It is the mere fact that spots are presented at all that reminds us of Hirst, since nothing else bears a striking similarity. But what is it that makes them the wrong kind of spots?

Firstly, since the spot paintings come in a greyscale monochrome variety, as well as the multi-coloured vibrant and pastel shades, there is no reason to think that Hirst cannot – or will not – produce ones which have all yellow spots. Secondly, the geometry of the picture is an acceptable variation on the theme, so that does not make them the wrong kinds of spots. Thirdly, the fact that they are painted directly on to the wall is immaterial, since it is highly probable that Hirst would send an assistant to apply spots to your wall at home if you could stomach the financial cost of doing so.

The most obvious explanation of why these are the wrong kind of spots is to appeal to the authorial intention and the absolute authority of the artist as producer of the work. Since these spots were not made by or in collaboration with Hirst himself or Science Ltd, they do not constitute a spot painting. But this misses the mark slightly by assuming that we are interested in authenticity, supposing as it does that a Hirst/Science arrangement of spots is the only kind that is rightly called a spot painting. True as this may be, it is a much less interesting way of thinking about things than the idea that the wrong kind of spots tells us something rather deep about the ontology and semantics of the spot paintings. After all, Hirst puts spots on everything, from beer glasses to skateboards, which are also the wrong kind of spots even though the spots themselves are indiscernible from the right kind. These are the wrong kind of spots because they are used as decoration for everyday items and not as devices to communicate an artistic message; they are not, that is, instantiations of the pure concept of the spot painting, but a quotation of that concept out of its ordinary semantic context, where it means something else entirely from what it normally means.

So the very fact that we can have the wrong kind of spots tells us something about the meaning of the spot paintings. In order to be a spot painting, it has to mean the thing that the concept of the spot painting is designed to mean. Meaning is, in part, a result of the authorial intention behind it, but this is not the whole story, since if intentions alone determined meaning then we would have a Humpty-Dumpty theory of language. In this case, the meaning is partly determined by the concept of the spot painting, which is realised in a finite variety of ways. That is, the spots have meaning in virtue of their being presented in a certain sort of way rather than in another way.

These are the wrong kind of spots, not just because they lack the requisite intentions and provenance, but also because they are presented in a way that does not carry the meaning of the spot painting. This is important because it illustrates that the spot paintings are not lawless: although prone to variation, and unpredictably so, there are guidelines for what counts as a spot painting, namely that they are painted on a particular range of surfaces which can be placed in a variety of positions. It is worth noting this because it assures us that the concept of the spot painting is a semantic concept, as well as an aesthetic one, which has been thought through in such a way as to be a clearly refined concept with certain boundaries. With this in mind, we can understand the spot paintings as entities which are ontologically stable, since their identities are determined by logical parameters and do not admit of outlandish interpretations. The fact that this is cemented by the relevance of intentions is a happy fact at the bedrock of all communicative practice; whilst the wrong kind of spots lack these intentions in some cases and not in others, looking beyond the intentional facts to the semantics they imply shows the spot paintings to be replete with meaning at the same time as having sensible intellectual boundaries.

Are Spot Paintings Singular or Multiple Artworks?

Philosophers hold a distinction between singular and multiple arts, where the former are works of which there is one unique artefact that cannot be reproduced, such as painting and sculpture, and the latter are works which admit of instances that are cut from a blueprint, such as prints, music and literature. According to this metaphysical wisdom, one might think that the spot paintings are multiples whose instances are manifold.

The waters are muddied here by the fact that each spot painting is different, so they seem singular, but this might be cleared up by admitting that they are instances not of the one spot painting but of the idea of the spot painting. This would be similar to the way in which a print made from a plate is different from another print from the same plate but is nonetheless an authentic instance or a piece of music played at the conductor’s (reasonable) discretion in a variation from the score is a genuine instance of the work.

The question, then, is whether this is an accurate and interesting way of theoretically characterising the spot paintings. It seems that it is not, since it runs the risk of denying that the singularity of the idea is capable of generating further singularity in its realisation. That is, if each spot painting is an instance of the singular idea, then there is nothing interesting or valuable about a given spot painting. This is certainly wrong in the case of music, so what can we say about spot paintings? For a start, each one is an individual work that is both formally and conceptually different from the others, in such a way that the singular idea is deployed to different ends, to mean, as it were, different things when present in different forms. It is even possible that one spot painting is more interesting and valuable than another. What does this mean? Does it mean that spot paintings are actually singular works of art?

On the Ontology of Spot Paintings

A longer version of this article can be found at The Art of Spectacle project website.

There must be something more than the mere presence of spots on a canvas to make a spot painting a Damien Hirst Spot Painting.

When thinking about the spot paintings, it is important to remember that Hirst is a conceptual artist. To think about them as – or in terms of – painting is a mistake, which is the source of much misunderstanding and criticism.