| The John Moores 24 Painting competition is the longest running, open painting competition in the United Kingdom. Hosted biannually by The Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, England since 1957, it is open to all artists living or working in the UK. This year, it attracted 2,300 slide entries. A short list of 268 paintings were viewed, resulting in the 52 exhibitors vying for the $48,000 first prize and four $4,800 runner up awards. This year, the jury was made up of Tracy Emin (unmade bed and all of the people that she ever slept with), Sir Peter Blake (Sgt Peppers sleeve and met the Queen), Jason Brooks, a former John Moores winner, and a couple of artnocrats; Andrea Rose and Ann Bukantas. |  |
No Free Radicals – Ralph Darbyshire
The John Moores 24 Painting competition is the longest running, open painting competition in the United Kingdom. Hosted biannually by The Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, England since 1957, it is open to all artists living or working in the UK. This year, it attracted 2,300 slide entries. A short list of 268 paintings were viewed, resulting in the 52 exhibitors vying for the $48,000 first prize and four $4,800 runner up awards.
This year, the jury was made up of Tracy Emin (unmade bed and all of the people that she ever slept with), Sir Peter Blake (Sgt Peppers sleeve and met the Queen), Jason Brooks, a former John Moores winner, and a couple of artnocrats; Andrea Rose and Ann Bukantas.
The winner, Before Vermeer’ s Clouds by Martin Greenland, is a beautifully crafted, illusionary landscape, which features a tropical waterfall flowing rudely into the calm of a distant provincial town. A peculiar, multicoloured tower dominates the horizon and two scary, Constable-like poplars echo the indestructible twin spires of Cologne Cathedral, securing Greenland’s place in the “new uncanny.” All this sits under the taciturn weight of a clumsy reworking of the sky in Vermeer’s A View Of Deft (1660-61). But Greenland’s practice owes more to Pieter Brueghel and his concern for nature, cosmic landscapes and the “Monde Renverse,” whose satirical inversion exploited the foolishness of man and the wisdom of fools and is predated by 400 years the “ism” of which Greenland is a “neo.” Like Brueghel, Greenland uses as sources proverbs, fables and metaphors and makes painterly combinations that smell of inexplicable, invisible force.
Greenland is not a bad “best of show,” not just because he adheres so faithfully to the maxims of his neo-Surrealist genre, but also because he does buttock-clenching vacuity with such profundity, and with great fiscal insight.
Another possible winner and, to my mind, a more solid and resolute candidate for enthronement, might have been Neil Kelly’s Shit Picnic. This work portrays a dismal, minimal, rough-hewn landscape dominated by a huge electricity pylon towering over a forlorn blue picnic rug. This works on three levels. Firstly it functions as a joke, secondly because it is formally articulate and resourceful and, thirdly, and most importantly, because it has a residual narrative that reveals connection, empathy and solidarity. This goes beyond the prerequisite of the psychological tension of the all-pervasive “psychological tensionists.” Shit Picnic has ill-defined yet episodic pretentions. The infamous rape scene in Remy Belvaux’s 1992 film Man Bites Dog had cinema audiences laughing raucously as the absurdist vignette reached its flippant climax. The laughter spilt effortlessly into the next scene, which depicts the unspeakable aftermath of exclusively human carnage. Without relying on filmic devices, Shit Picnic does the same—our laughter existing as the bridge that makes our arrival so regrettable.
Jeff McMillan also takes us somewhere unpalatable in The Seducer, which is an upside-down, thrift store-purchased seascape in which he’s semi-submerged while also in a vat of yellow oil paint. Texan by birth, his diaphanous foreground makes play of the huge, anxious landscapes that hint at a biographical imperative. The Seducer does what it says but, thankfully, with less reliance on psychological tensionism. However, Richard Moon’s The Sitter does rely heavily on incongruity, but it also manages to employ historic notions of human frailty and domesticity. Just as Jean Baptiste Chardin did in 18th century Paris, Moon documents intimacy and humanity and his re-contextualisation of what is essentially an appropriated image is as much about middle management psychosis as were Chardin’s concerns for the petite bourgeoisie. That Chardin’s portrait of his wife still hangs in the Metropolitan should be warning enough for Moon that, at 35, his longevity is not dependent on chasing the zeitgeist. The Sitter is a good painting despite Moon’s sideways glances.
The four lucky recipients of the $4,800 prizes are all competent in their own tribes; all are at first engaging, but passionless and, with the exception of Graham Crowley’s Red Reflection, fundamentally witless.
James White’s photorealist, electronic drum kit In The Basement (kit II), is an ode to Richard Estes. It is art about art—cold, rational, expressionless, exquisitely painted but unprofitable. Vincent Hawkins’ improvised doodling, After Paul Nash, clearly has nothing to do with Paul Nash. Nash was known for his cosmopolitan breadth of references. Unlike Hawkins, Nash’s references were about new ideas and not about intellectual legitimacy through appropriation. However, Matthew Burrows appears to have borrowed, rationally, from the 18th century engravings of Giovanni Piranesi and his supernatural architecture of the imagination. Baptism is expressive, illustrative but irredeemably unapproachable.
Graham Crowley’s Red Reflection is a romantic thriller. An image of rural Cork in the Republic of Ireland, it is in fact not red, but orange. Liverpool, its temporary home, has a huge Catholic community and is often referred to as “Ireland’s Third City.” The Orange Order is the largest Protestant organisation in Northern Ireland, its origins dating back to the 17th century battle for supremacy between Protestantism and Catholicism. I would like to think that Crowley has done something subversive by offering up Red Reflection to a city whose foundations are saturated in this history. If he is being agitational, he is part of a modern elite who are routed in the tradition of using landscape as a vehicle for social and political comment, and for human affirmation. That he should have to share a stage with Gerard Hemsworth is tragic, but this is the price one pays for inclusion in a mixed show.
Hemsworth’s Water Into Wine is a bland, synthetic, masking tape anachronism. It’s about as bad as painting gets. It’s closer to a tag than to a piece of art. It’s “Gerard woz ere” writ large with comical effect for a jury who are apparently at pains to preside without the identity of the artists revealed. So I wonder if the jury allowed themselves the time to discuss semiotic duplicity or concepts of shared sign language. Was it Professor Hemsworth’s (of Goldsmiths College, London) painterly grandeur that secured his position in the selection, or was it simply bestowed upon him in recognition of his services in the 80s art fair, airport lounge genre? Never the less, Hemsworth’s “thing” does at least act as a hemariodal pinch to shake us from the unavoidable seduction of John Moores’ frivolity and to help remind us of how important, potentially life-changing and just downright glorious a state of absorption can be when confronted by a truly revelatory painting. This may sound overly effusive, even reactionary in the face of the un-hijackable formalism of trite techno screams and bad, “badpaintings” that genre-hop their way round the showrooms of Chelsea, but the potential for personal, social and spiritual transformation should not be down-graded to a kind of empirical gamesmanship that forces the known and the unknown to inhabit the same, irrational space. It is the irrational, the inexplicable that can ameliorate the stifling requirements of a relativist doctrine that dismisses the theoretical flaw, the seldom-muttered maxim, “because it just is.”
The John Moores exhibition tries hard to promote itself as a showcase for the state of the art. Unfortunately, the premise upon which the contest teeters is so fatally flawed by the pragmatics of jury selection, time-scale and the essential predisposition of people who make what they believe to be art, that an accurate survey of what is going on in real areas of the contemporary avant-garde, the wasteland of tenements, hospitals, garden sheds and nocturnally cleared dining room tables is rendered unfit for any purpose.
The jury, a London-centric mix of Y. B. A., Royal lackey and art Mafioso have selected 52 paintings, out of which 38 are by artists living and working in London. All have studied at the undergraduate level. Is it really a valid supposition that, in 2,300 entries, nothing of any value, or interest could have been offered up by a painter who had not been to art school, such as Jean Baptist Chardin? Was Dubuffet whistling in the wind when he wrote Asphyxiatng Culture only 33 years ago?
Jury deliberation time divorces one of the fundamental assessment blocks of good painting, the disclosure period—the time it takes for a work to make itself apparent. The judges, who clearly feel sufficiently well versed enough to juggle precepts of scale, colour relationship and composition along with the realities of genre hierarchies, are, in fact, re-energizing discreditable notions of retail and production.
To enjoy the John Moores 24, which one should, it is necessary to suspend incredulity and to approach it as one might the prospect of an evening of Andrew Lloyd Webber theatrics. You know it’s a bit crap, but you’ll tap your feet and be humming for days after.
Robert Hughes speculates that, “The truly radical work of art is the one that offers you something to hold on to in the midst of the flux of possibility.” Pictures can do this, but there aren’t any doing it in the John Moores 24. But hey, what do I know. I always make my bed in the morning and I’m unlikely ever to become a knight of the dysfunctional, meddlesome, in need of regicidal editing, realm.
