Happy new year!

This caligraphy in traditional Chinese style was produced by California based artist Tomi Ito Levin. It says "Happy new year!" and I have nothing to add to it. I have no idea weather or not this is any good, since it's not even in the vicinty of the art I usually deal with. But I thought it looks nice, and there's no need to overanalyze things on a night like this.

Picture this: Marie Benoist

Marie Guillemine Benoist (1768-1826) was a painter right in the breaking point between traditional and modern art. She was a student of the great Jacques-Louis David, something that can be seen in her painting style as well as in her perspective and choice of motives.

Portrait of a black woman (1800) is a very special painting. It is one of the first portraits of real existing african person in western art. The earlier paintings of black people were mostly style studies or symbols. The same is true for pictures of women from this time period, as shown by for example Delacroix’s famous Freedom Leads The People (1830).

Benoists painting, on the contrary, is very much a fully matured portrait of a real modell. There is most probably a political undertone in it. Perhaps Benoist was making a connection between the French abolishing of slavery in 1794, and the struggle for women’s rights. But it’s the artists personal relation to the motive that makes it great art.

Picture this is a standing feature in weekly journal Flamman.

Public Art and Public Outcries

When placed in public spaces art seems to invoke much stronger feelings than in a museum. An intelligent way to use this can be seen in Fellipe Dulzaides’ play with perception Double Take. What could have been just another installation suddenly seems very interesting when it’s displayed in a public space.

Double Take is sponsored by transnational corporation Clear Channel, a fact that has created controversy in the Californian art community. The critics are basically saying that this is not “real street art”. The notion of the artist as pure and clean, untainted by the need for money, seems pretty old, in my opinion. Even artists have to eat, don’t they?

A group of Austrian artists, on the other hand, seem to feel that “more is more”. Instead of small talk they are outright shouting their message over large billboards across Vienna. The most controversial of the boards depicts French president Jacques Chirac having an orgy with president Bush and the queen of England. Earlier today the billboards were taken down due to political pressure.

Though the Austrian billboard pieces are pretty funny in a Beavis and Butthead-sort of way I personally prefer the more subtle approach as shown by Dulzaides.

Picture this: Komar and Melamid

Vitaly Komar (1943-) and Alexander Melamid (1945-) are amongst the most provocative of the post modern artists to grow out of the enclosed Soviet society. During the 1960s and early -70s they founded the Sots Art movement that combined social realism with elements of pop art and dadaism. They were expelled from the youth section of the Union of Soviet Artists in 1973. A year later, they were arrested, and most of their production was destroyed.

After moving to the US, they have continued to produce ironic clichés of traditional Soviet art, like in Lenin Hails a Cab (1993). They have been accused of antisemitism because of the paintings where they combined the Star of David with swastikas. As with the rest of their production the explanation is more probably that they seem to look at public outcry as a value in it’s own right.

Picture this is a standing feature in the weekly journal Flamman.

Flogging a dead kitten

Nathalia Edenmont made a huge mass media breakthrough last year when Swedish tabloids made headlines like “The animals are being killed to become art!” I never did understand why Edenmont’s art is so controversial. Depicting dead animals is hardly a very new idea. Not even killing them yourself is new. Part of it might be that the photos are hauntingly beautiful, but Andres Serrano already made real human corpses – even murder victims! – look poetic, like this.

A short background: Edenmont kills cute animals, like kittens or bunnies or mice. She then combines the chopped up body parts with objects, or flowers, or something similar, and take photographs of them. They looks like old still life paintings at first glance.

Her pictures are very suggestive when seen in full format. It’s hard to do them real justice on a computer screen. They invoke strange – some might say surreal – feelings. But beyond that… nothing. Her work is empty of any real meaning except for the usual I-want-to-examine-the-double-standards-of-society-eating-steak-but-being-horrified-by-dead-kittens-rant.

It annoys me. She is obviously a very talented photographer, and her work is extremely charismatic, and that’s all she has to say? That modern society has double standards for animal rights? Most of us figured that out in our teens, and dealt with it or became vegans… besides perhaps Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson, but I digress…

Nathalia Edenmont is on the road to fame and international recognition. Her dead animals have created controversy wherever they’ve been shown. I just hope that she has something more to say, or she will soon become very boring.

Sharp Dressed Men

Artists dress the way the paint. I’m pretty sure it’s not the other way around. Look at one of the leading minimalists, Frank Stella. Besides the fact that he used to be the best dressed painter on earth – when he was young and handsome – you can clearly see how his slick, expensive suit matches his intellectual, rather cold, work.

It becomes even more apparent when he is put next to any of the abstract expressionists. Expressionism is very macho, even bombastic. Coherently most of the artists looks like men’s men with jeans and a tattered t-shirts, and facial expressions a mix between Hemingway and Bruce Springsteen.

Think of Dalí with his surreal moustaches. Or a bare breasted Picasso. In these postmodern times we don’t like to think about the artist. We pretend that the artwork can, more or less, stand its’ own ground. We praise the ideas and the concepts. If it was possible, some of us would like to delete the signature completely.

It’s just talk. It’s not even possible to begin to think a world of art without iconic artists. The best painters and sculpturers are stars of their fields just as any rock star would be. And the way to boost real success is to know how to build a good image around your personality. Don’t let yourself be fooled by the fact that “a good image” can mean “very low key and humble” for some artists.

Where am I going with this? I’m not really sure… it could be some sort of criticism of commercialism in the world of art, or the fixation with personality in a mass media society. But I really don’t mind those things all that much.

I do think that artists used to dress better 50 years ago, however.

Pollock's Bollocks and a Bacon Cock

Pollock's Bollocks and a Bacon Cock as Crucifixion, painted in 2003, by finish artist Janne Räisenen, is a monumental piece. It’s large in size as well as in technique. Fact is, I don’t like it that much, even though Räisenen is celebrated as one of the most interesting “younger” artists coming out of Scandinavia these days. To me, Räisenens work is to deep in imagery and to shallow in thought.

So, why did I name my blog Pollock’s Bollocks then? Basically for the same reason that Räisenen must have named his painting: it sounds cool. Most art is pretty shallow in that sense. Maybe they will deny it, but the artists of the 20th century were as important as iconic figures as there work ever was. The image of the artist is, if not everything, than surely a lot – this is just as true when discussing the later iconic artists such as Serrano or Damien Hirst, as it was with Picasso or Dalí.

Hence, this blog is first and foremost about me. It’s about what I believe, think and do. It’s not everything about me, obviously. It will contain my opinions and feelings about that which we call art, and related topics.

I really haven’t come to terms with what I am trying to here yet. I’m hoping to work that out as the blog develops. I haven’t even worked out the templates quite yet. Some of the things that I will publish here are:

1. Comments on contemporary art, primarily young Scandinavian artists.
2. Introductions to pictures from the history of arts. These will be very short text, some of which have already been published in Swedish in the weekly journal Flamman.
3. Discussions on what art is, and why (or why not…) it’s important.
4. Opinions on the need for more popular – less elitist – forms of art, and how the situation could be improved.

Now on to a personal introduction, and a few disclaimers:

I’m in way over my head here, folks. I have no real education in art, besides what I’ve managed to learn on my own. English is not my mother tongue… that is probably obvious by now.

I am 33 years old, living in Stockholm, Sweden. I am a journalist. My daytime job is as web editor for Vänsterpartiet, but I also do art critics and editorial comments for Flamman. I’m married to the coolest woman alive, Jenny Lindahl, and together we have a sincerely disturbed, but highly loved dog, a Rhodesian Ridgeback named Coco.