An Artist of Our Time

Christopher Wool Damien Hirst Lucian Freud Bill Viola Mat Collishaw Jitish Kallat Live from Italy, It’s Artissima The Appendix: Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Pipilotti Rist, and Paul H-O

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Contested meaning
Desperation. We don’t know what we’re doing. The collectors are still buying but the prices are down 30 percent and much less work is moving than before. Who will tell us what our lives mean now? Since 2007 Merlin Carpenter has been restaging in various international galleries an event he calls "The Opening," in which all the paintings for the show are done on the evening of the private view. His website illustrates each edition of "The Opening" in the same way: a photo of blank canvases in a gallery and then a photo of the canvases defaced with scrawled, sloppy black lettering, like joke Christopher Wools. They say things like DIE COLLECTOR SCUM, I HATE YOU ART WORLD CUNTS, I LIKE CHRIS WOOL, and FUCK.

The way the routine works is that the audience starts arriving at the usual private view hour, they see a gallery full of pristine blank surfaces (expensive linen canvas expertly primed), and they mill around for a long time and start to get restless and impatient, and at that point (after he’s been milling too) Carpenter gets a bucket of paint and starts daubing. It lasts for about 10 minutes. There’s usually something disobliging about the gallerist. At Reena Spaulings in New York one canvas read: RELAX IT'S ONLY ANOTHER CRAP REENA SPAULINGS SHOW.

Is it serious? Is it puerile attention-seeking? Or is it that, but with other dimensions, other depths? Which bit is the deep part? The latest edition was at the Simon Lee Gallery in London. The paintings there were priced at $40,000 each. The advance publicity featured a photo of Die collector scum from the Spaulings show, which sold at the 2007 Miami art fair on its opening day. Many others have entered collections. Buyers resist if there’s only a splash or a squiggly mark on the canvas, but so long as the words can be read, the works tend to sell.

As I write, it’s too early to know if the Simon Lee show will beat the credit crunch, but it doesn’t really matter: the institution of the vernissage has still been made into a site of contested meaning: value, performance, spectacle, and money. How does the meaning work, though? You can only ask more questions. Is Carpenter morally better than Lucian Freud, whose prices are manipulated by auction house scams? And if we were at one of these "Openings" would we be better people now because we’ve had the experience? And are his galleries, following the pretend-flagellation he puts them through, now purified and morally better than hedge-fund people? The issues are too silly to follow up on (the answer is "no" to all of the above, of course), even though somewhere they are actually operating, and he has kept them in focus, and they’re the right issues, and he hasn’t done it in a turgid way, as many agitprop artists certainly have in the past (with different issues that were also the right ones at that time). He does so many twists on self-consciousness and moralizing (and doing the right thing and being strategic and careful and going way over the edge but somehow staying firmly within a protected circle) that it’s tempting just to dismiss him, if only in order to forget about the problem.

Cheerful bollocks
What draws me in again is the utter rightness of his sneers, which I see confirmed like crazy in the new show at Haunch of Venison, called "Mythologies." This show is basically about art market swank, but it masquerades as something important and thoughtful. There is a huge list of players. It’s on a museumlike scale. Some of the artists (from every point of the globe) are big sellers, some medium, others new arrivals. The top names ratify the unknowns. Damien Hirst renders his diamond skull on an epic scale, a photographic image on canvas, with an addition of resin and glass. The aesthetic of this painting is something like the glossy look of a page in an auction catalogue, a philistine’s idea of luxury. Some appalling videos by Bill Viola show actors writhing and grimacing in slow motion to enact Viola’s idea of what it means for olden-days paintings of saints and so on to be emotionally moving. The actors are actually moving, geddit?