A Franz West retrospective in England or anywhere else is
going to be messy. The Austrian Actionist has a way of raising havoc in the
most unexpected of places. He’s liable to paint out the details of billboards
and add his own salacious details, or make weirdly shaped moulds and insist
that the audience try them on for size. I entered the ground floor space to be
confronted by a small army of dumbfounded gallery goers. While some where
trying to fathom West’s multi-coloured paper mach� blobs, others were
scratching their heads and looking at sets of large retro silver chairs. Maybe
in Europe (that doesn’t include the UK), or even in America, such brave
attempts on the part of artists at audience interaction would be swallowed
whole. The Brits however have problems with art that comes on a bit too “touchy
feely.” It’s their reserved nature. When art doesn’t do what its supposed to
do, like hang nice and still on the wall, they get a bit scared. People in
England see a chair in a modern art gallery, then stand and ask, “what does it
mean?” Now, if your going to ponder the meaning of a chair, at least sit on the
damn thing while you do it.
With their inherited history of acquiescence however, walking
off in a huff is usually all UK audiences confronted by contemporary art can
do. Franz West’s work plays to this sentiment unapologetically, because it
really is just trash. Are his shabby looking forms and juvenile reworkings of
adverts worthy of further consideration? We should try to understand West as a
sort of paradoxical artist, an artist that only succeeds by failing, failing
himself and failing the audience. His works have no sublime aesthetic
revelation to offer. Instead, they taunt you with their complete uselessness.
And the more useless they are as objects, the more successful they are as
artworks. Herein lies the paradox.
I picture Franz West as an extremely melancholy character.
Intrigued by the possibilities of human creation, then deflated by the
realities of his own endeavour. The image Homepage
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cruelly illustrates this difference between desire and reality. The crudely
reworked (car?) advert shows an expectant and hungry female, lustfully gripping
a meaty frankfurter. To her left, a busy businessman runs around with nothing
but a vinegary gherkin poking out of trousers. The message could not be more
clear. Everybody knows about sex and advertising, but to what degree to we buy
the images of advertising, as well as the products?
The upstairs gallery would have been more successful if the
volume had been turned up, rather than down, so to speak. But it’s always
interesting to see West give up creative control for selective power when he
turns curator. Exhibiting works by Martin Kippenberger, Raymond Pettibon,
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Rudolph Polansky, Wolfgang Tillmans, Hans Weigund and
Heimo Zobernig, his taste, unsurprisingly, veers toward slack aesthetics.
For hardcore Franz West fans this show won’t have been as
mind-blowing as his Gagosian London show back in 2001. But for the many
visitors to the Whitechapel for whom this show will have been a first
introduction, it must have proved blissfully confusing.
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After
the Whitechapel, I headed for Dr. Larka’s exhibition. Larka is a trained and
practicing tattoo artist, now branching out into the world of fine art. Despite
their current popularity, I am still of the rather old fashioned opinion that
tattoos are purely the ornamention of the criminal classes. Dr. Larka’s work
definitely confirmed this view. The show was made up in the main part of pages
from 50’s girlie
magazines that the artist had painted with his own designs and imagery. Needless
to say the applied tattoos were all of a depraved and heinous nature. The bonny
lasses had been defaced with all manner of snakes, spider webs, five pointed
stars, skulls, cross bones and the occasional weeping jesus. Who can say why
the prevailing fashion in the (under)world of tattoo parlours is so fixated on
death and morbidity? Its so rare to see a nice Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck
etched on to someone’s arm. Perhaps the truth is that Mickey and Donald, unlike
Michael Jackson and Satan, just aren’t “bad” enough.
Religious
iconography was quietly constant in all work, but the painting "San
Juan" brought the theme to a head. A page, ripped from a religious
publication depicting an innocent infant cradling a baby lamb, had been
transformed to show some sort of child demon. The fallen angel’s wooden
crucifix is now elongated and rips straight through the poor sheep’s neck. Atop
the staff are the words "Ecce Anus Dei," probably a bastardisation of
“Ecce Agnus Dei” or “behold the Lamb of God”. With such clever visual puns
and the abundance of sexy babes it was easy to appreciate the Doctor’s work.
The problem was with the small scale of the gallery space and the equally
domestic size and hang of the paintings. For all their “bad” intentions, things
felt a bit too cute and collectable.
©
cedar lewisohn 2003 |
