Nathan Coley

[imomus]

My mother isn't a fan of contemporary art. She came with Hisae and me to Edinburgh's Dean Gallery on Sunday mostly to look at some surrealist paintings. Surrealism may have been deeply disturbing to bourgeois sensibilities seventy years ago, but now Max Ernst and Paul Delvaux paintings are reassuringly literary and pictorial -- quaint, even. The stuff I wanted to see was in "Off the Wall", the museum's collection of floor and ceiling-mounted work by contemporary Scottish artists like Jim Lambie and Martin Creed.



For my mother, a room with coloured tape on the floor, or filled with balls of different sizes and colours (Martin Creed's installation) is some kind of hoax or joke. She tut tuts at it. In a way, though, it's hardly any more challenging than the surrealism she likes -- cute formalism, diluted conceptualism with an accent on the decorative, the colourful, the playful. It brightens a grey Sunday in Edinburgh, anyway.



Something my mother and I could agree on, though, was the brilliance of the Nathan Coley installation "The Lamp of Sacrifice, 286 Places of Worship, Edinburgh 2004". This isn't part of "Off The Wall", though it could be. Two rooms have been turned into a scale model of all the places of worship listed in the Edinburgh and region Yellow Pages. Crammed together, the 286 churches, meeting rooms and mosques are made of cardboard and stand about four feet high. It took Coley six months (and some money from Bloomberg) to make, and you can spend a lot of time -- and have a lot of fun -- trying to recognize the buildings, towering over them like King Kong.

I ended up buying the Coley book There Will Be No Miracles Here (it's published by Edinburgh's Fruitmarket Gallery, but good luck finding a page about it on their re-designed website).

I find Coley's understatement interesting -- though the works are visually very pleasing, they're essentially architectural models, so they have something dry and restrained about them. There are camouflaged churches and mosques covered in Daniel-Buren-type stripes, a stage-set but-and-ben cottage set down in incongruous locations on the Isle of Bute, and some nice slideshows juxtaposing a Barratt home with descriptions of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, or ramshackle patina pigeon lofts with catalogue descriptions of upmarket conservatories and summer houses. Coley quotes Ruskin ("It is not the church we want, but the sacrifice") and seems to hunger for his spiritual seriousness, or Le Corbu's.



Coley (a Scot, like Lambie and -- by upbringing, anyway -- Creed) is up for the Turner Prize this year. He'd be my choice if I were on the jury. In fact, it's Michael Bracewell and Miranda Sawyer who'll decide. Oh, and Fiona Bradley, who directs Edinburgh's Fruitmarket Gallery and wrote the introduction to the book about him. So I'd say he's in with a good chance (knowing Bracewell, I think he might be well-disposed towards him too). I also like Wallinger's appropriation of Brian Haw's Iraq protest art, banned from the lawn in front of the House of Commons. The winner will be announced on December 3rd.

Comments

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

There was a report on the news this morning about an art instalation here that's just a giant glass box filled with thick mist that you can walk in.

I think contemporary art only really has one way forward and that's the creation of immersive enviroments, which will reach it's peak once we have virtual reality fine-tuned properly to the point we can create our own realities.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

Oh, and just to clarify -- I know art installations have been prominant since the 1970s, theyre hardly new, however, they've very restricted by space and money. You would have to have a lot of money at your disposal to take installation art up a notch. Where as 2D art and 3D sculpture really has very few restrictions in terms of media available, installation art is still very restricted I think.

[(Anonymous)]

You're right that surrealism seems quaint now, and was in any case subsumed into popular culture as long ago as Hitchcock's Spellbound. But I have to say that a lot of contemporary art has a rather quaint feeling to it as well, only this time the reference is the sixties. Creed's lights going on and off? Could be some 60s conceptual piece. Coloured tape on the floor? Maybe some op art/pop art thing from the 60s. Or even the floor on the cover of a solo Syd Barrett album. In fact, with this return to the sixties it seems contemporary art is in pretty much the same place as contemporary rock. They both seem something of an exhausted medium, even if the genre restrictions of art are a little looser. (I'm guessing the main difference for you is that you're seduced by the glamour of art, whereas the glamour of rock, not so much.)

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

I think contemporary art in this era has reached the stage where it's restricted not by restraints upon ideas but by present technology. We just dont have the technology to progress further at this present time.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I only ever bought rock albums for the covers anyway. When they switched to CD, that was really the beginning of the end.

I think the rock establishment has a tendency to reward relatively moronic and unoriginal beahviour, whereas the art establishment rewards relatively intelligent and original behaviour, although as you say there are only degrees of difference between them. But let me put it this way. On the cover of Q magazine this month is Oasis. Yes, Oasis. On the cover of Frieze is George Condo.



Andreas Gursky ("In Praise of Blandness") is the cover feature of Modern Painters, wheras Word puts Nick Cave and other "mavericks" on the cover. Gursky was born in 1955, Cave in 1957. Gursky is the more radical and relevant of those two, I think -- he's managed to photograph globalization, a pretty difficult feat -- yet it's Nick Cave who's being presented as a "maverick" (if you read the feature, this is mostly about the virtue of being unfashionable and how great Neil Young is) whereas Gursky is praising blandness. This is what I meant when I talked about Coley's "restraint". The rock world promotes conservative values aggressively, insisting they're radical ones. The art world is quietly deviant.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, Nick Cave is interesting because he was quite subversive in the early eighties, before turning into a crooning balladeer and, more lately, a rootsy rock guy. It's the story with most of the interesting rock people - Bowie, Reed, Ferry, etc etc. Although you have to wonder if the same thing doesn't ultimately happen to artists. After all, 20 years on and Rachel Whiteread is still doing plaster casts of spaces, the Chapmans are still doing their cartoon horror show, etc etc.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Let's compare the intro to a Modern Painters feature (http://www.modernpainters.co.uk/flash/magazine.html) with the opening to a recent article about Nick Cave's Grinderman project:

"Scorning gardening as "superficial embellishment", Kongjian Yu comes from a landscape school that champions biodiversity and flood control rather than shrubbery and ornamental fountains."

That's the art mag. Now here's Filter mag (http://www.filter-mag.com/index.php?id=14308&c=2) on Cave:

"The village is in trouble. Bandits dressed in black have been screaming into town, burning down the churches, murdering the livestock, raping the women. For months the villagers have been terrified, too afraid to leave their homes, incapable of fighting back. Yes, this is very bad. Very bad indeed. But suddenly a lone figure enters the frame, filling it with his wide-as-a-river shoulders and larger-than-life presence. Somehow he’s bigger than the village itself, his dusty jacket blowing in the wind, dirty white hat pulled low. He wanders into town, seemingly from out of nowhere, a phantom; there’s a slight gait to his walk but a twinkle in his eye that says, “Howdy folks. I’m here to help.” He’s a godsend, a miracle, the answer to their prayers. Suddenly, the villagers think, things are looking up.

"Nick Cave thinks our village is in trouble. Nearly 50 years in, the esoteric bandleader feels a supreme disconnection with many aspects of our society."

Now, both of these articles present critiques of society. Which of them would George W. Bush prefer? The measured Chinese eco-man with his flood control and biodiversity theme or the vigilante cowboy who's going to clean up the world (while complaining that he can't get pussy any more)?

[(Anonymous)]

The comparison is a little too pat. You'll find a lot more contemporary art exploring violent transgression of every sort (I mean, wasn't that what the YBAs were all about?) than extolling the virtues of biodiversity. The art world has at least as much in common with Cave as with utopian ecology.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You would never get a contemporary artist described as a cowboy strolling into town to kill the bad men, though. You might get a Paul McCarthy cowboy buggering his own horse.

[(Anonymous)]

You would never get a contemporary artist described as a cowboy strolling into town to kill the bad men, though.

Given the obvious irony of that description (Cave grew up in suburban Melbourne and went to a posh private school), I think you could easily imagine a contemporary artist described that way!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Okay, that's your challenge for the day. Find a piece of contemporary art coverage as retro-macho and right wing populist as that Cave article and bring it back here!

[(Anonymous)]

Come now, Momus, you know that there's always been the retro-macho hard-drinking bullfighting side to art, from Picasso to Pollock to all those hard-partying British artists who pickle sharks as if they were trophies from some Hemingway-esque hunting escapade. As for cowboys, I think you'll find Hirst favours a Stetson.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Again, I want the evidence!

Come on, let's see Hirst in a Stetson!

a damien hirst google image search result:

[(Anonymous)]

http://www.looktothestars.org/photo/89/thumbnail.jpg

[(Anonymous)]

Google "damien hirst" "cowboy hat" and you'll find references to him wearing one. Examples:

"Hirst ruined his sartorial one-upmanship by getting into a passionate argument with a young artist who would only be identified as 'Dallas', about the latter's cowboy hat ("It's shit. Take it off. It's shit. Why are you wearing it? It's shit."). No-one could quite understand why Hirst was so annoyed until news of Friday's Evening Standard piece on the Biennale drifted back. It featured Hirst wearing, erm, a cowboy hat." artrumour.com

"Over vacation, I met the richest artist in the world. "Look, there's Damien Hirst," said Paul, the bartender, pointing to a man dressed in a white cowboy hat and white cowboy clothes. "He's the richest living artist in the world." from some blog

Momus, you're being a bit blinkered if you really think there's no macho posing in the art world!

[(Anonymous)]

... or macho competitive oneupmanship in blog comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

No, I don't say "no macho posing". Hermann Nitsch is obviously macho. But I think machismo -- where it exists -- is put in the service of the non-conventional in the art world, whereas in the rock world it's (in my favourite Susan Sontag phrase) "aggressive normality", which ties in with right wing populism.

The opposite of aggressive normality is gentle deviance (my preferred strategy, obviously) and the opposite of right wing populism is left wing elitism.

[(Anonymous)]

Guilty, your honour!

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

So stripes are subversive?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'd add that while "No Pussy Blues" is obviously both an example of a certain kind of wretched middle-aged machismo and a send-up of it, it has chosen that particular dialectic and that particular terrain to concentrate on. It's a terrain that rock has designated as its gravitational centre -- libido, rebellion, impulse, etc. That's rock's strength as a medium, but also its weakness.

And there's a "pigs in the pipe" element to all this too. Rock is a middle-aged man examining his libido. Art may be equally middle-aged, but its remit is much, much wider than rock's. It grows old much more gracefully.

[(Anonymous)]

not if they're White Stripes

[(Anonymous)]

Well, I think you're right about the "aggressive normality" of contemporary rock. Right also that art has a much wider remit. But I think you're also inclined to give contemporary art a bit of a free pass. Surely something like the Sensation exhibition of the late 90s was "aggressive normality" posing as transgression? And that's been a very constant trope in the art world.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, as a left wing elitist I'd have to say that whenever any art or media form flirts with a mass audience, "aggressive normality" -- not to mention a loss of its soul, identity, and sense of purpose -- is going to be the result. In my comparisons of the rock and art magazines up the page I didn't list circulations, but obviously the music mags command much bigger readerships. It's only natural, therefore, that what they cover and the way they cover it will skirt much closer to the doxa -- which any left wing elitist worth their salt would have to call "the toxic doxa"!

I'd like to link this to Malcolm McLaren's ideas about "benign failure" as well. I think any art form which can afford itself plenty of "benign failure" is probably doing okay. When it only tolerates toxic success, it's doomed to "abyss by ubiquity". (http://imomus.livejournal.com/183446.html)

But of course we reach our usual paradoxical recursive trope here.

1. Success is success!
2. No, success is failure!
3. Because success itself is a kind of failure, and failure itself a kind of success!
4. Therefore success is success!

perversions of the media culture

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

Anything the media gets is polluted, changed watered down and becomes second hand. Sontag referred to this as the cancer of the west.
Ying and Yang just ain't what they used to be. Oh what happened to the KINKS and Mike Doud.

[(Anonymous)]

Pop music is a very strange place for an avowed elitist to end up in! So mainstream success always entails losing your soul, identity and sense of purpose? That sounds like a horribly retro-romantic notion! And wasn't one of the great things about the popular music of the 60s and 70s the fact that it married originality with mass appeal?