Realism is alive and kicking

I found this beautiful painting by Kris Knight through Industrial Feces (a very good site by the way, well worth browsing through the archives!)

The face of this young girl somehow reminds me of Walker Evans photography. It’s realism with a sense of poetry. Her facial expression is beautifully translated, and it’s as if she looks straight out of the canvas. But, like Evans, Kris Knight manages to go beyond making a simple portrait. It looks like he has been trying to paint what the girl in the picture wants to be rather than what she actually is.

I don’t know much about the artist, but from the other work I’ve seen on his web site I have to say he struck gold with this one. Sadly, the rest isn’t nearly as good. I guess it goes to show you that a single master piece doesn’t make a master.

Why I love to hate Tansey

American painter Mark Tansey was a late discovery for me. The first picture I saw was Action Painting II, depicting a group of outdoor painters trying to capture a space shuttle launch on their canvases. It was funny, intelligent and to the point, and I giggled for about half an hour afterwards.

These days I just don’t know if I should hate or love him anymore. When looking at one picture at a time, it’s hard not to fall in love with it. When confronted by a larger collection of his work it feels like to much. It’s to smart, to ironic, to smug.

Tansey is either a brilliant technical painter with a frontline art theory, or just a Gary Larson for the elite. You decide.

Destruction and Depression

The Modern Museum in Stockholm shows off a large exhibition feauturing Swedish painter Dick Bengtsson (1936-1989) right now.

Bengtsson was truly a destructive artist. He destroyed himself and his own life through alcohol and depression, and he destroyed his own paintings by scratching them up, banging on them with different tools and generally subjecting them to all sorts of violence.

If he had a purpose with his art it's not easy to deciphered. His use of Nazi symbols, like the Swastika, was mysterious. He was obviously not a nazi, but his paintings don't seem to be about nazism at all when you look at them closely. It's perhaps not about authority and oppression in fascist society, but in every society.

The painting featured above is called Hitler and The Dream Kitchen, and I chose it because it seems extra relevant in these days of interior design fetischism.

Sleeping Beauty

I’m almost afraid to mention Anna Finney now. Together with Johan Nobell she has become a symbol for the kind of young artist that gets hyped to fast to soon by greedy galleries who wants to make a quick buck.

I still think she is worth a closer look though. She was first seen as a realist, but most critics seem to have realised that this is hardly the case. She might have elements of realism in her art, but she is much more than that. She has been called a symbolist and a surrealist too, but in the end it’s just words. And Finney’s art goes beyond those words. It is what it is.

She is obviously obsessed with the concept of sleeping. Her most recent exhibition shows people sleeping in different places and positions. Before that she made a series of paintings entitled Famous Bedrooms with paintings of, eeh… famous beds. The sleep she paints isn’t death, but it’s certainly rather close. The people in her paintings are taking a break from life itself.

In my humble opinion, and trying to ignore the hype, she is actually very good. She stands comfortably on the shoulders of earlier great painters and reaches out. For something new? Perhaps, but I won’t go that far just yet.

Something better than...

A friend of mine brought the picture posted above to my attention a few weeks ago, and it's been growing on me ever since.

It took a while for me to truly appriciate it, but I'm finding new ways to analyze it every time I look at it. Written on a wall by an anonymous wise ass who probably just wanted to be funny. But he could very well have produced a piece of art as thought provoking and new as Duchamp's Fontain.

Just look at it. And think.

Dirty Deeds

WARNING! Links may contain explicit pictures.

Transgression of moral boundaries is one of the most effective ways to make an artistic impact. It is in fact so effective that the interpretations of the works of art in the most provocative cases seem to focus almost exclusively on weather or not they are “morally justified”.

In some cases the results can be mindboggling to a viewer that lack the cultural, religious or moral standards that are needed to be provoked. To use myself as an example: I don’t get upset from viewing the work of Andres Serrano. I never was upset with them in the first place either. When I saw his Piss Christ for the first time I saw a profoundly catholic picture with deep religious connotations to The Last Supper. At the peak of his controversy it was almost impossible to discuss Serrano’s art in any other terms than weather or not he “should be allowed to profane” religious symbols or not.

The French artist Jean Rustin is much less known than Serrano but has still been able to stir up a surprisingly strong rage wherever he shows his work. His paintings are explicitly sexual, but not pornographic in any meaningful sense of the word. They are never meant to arouse, but rather to express an infinite solitude. A hint of post modern criticism of society’s institutionalized oppression can also be found. In a new high of misunderstanding art Rustin was at one period accused of being anti-Semitic, because his paintings of naked people in institution like environments was interpreted as “abusive to the victims of the Holocaust.”

American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe claimed himself not to be very interested of the subjects he took pictures of. His theory was purely formal, according to himself. Weather or not this was true can be argued – I lean towards “not true” myself, but the talk of his time was not even close to that kind of questions.

Some art, unlike that mentioned above, is more openly provocative. It has little to say beyond the obvious. In my opinion this is the case with for instance Gunther von Hagen’s human bodies slashed up and preserved in plastic, or Herman Nitsch’s strange “performance art” that pretty much consists of week long strange ritual “blood baths”.

In those cases the provocation is the point, and thus easily obtained. But for the likes of Rustin and Serrano the issue is more complex. Or at least it should be. On one hand, the strong reactions to their work promotes the questions they wish to say put to their audience. On the other hand it’s hard to hear the subtle tones when people are shouting at them in rage.

What Do We Know About Desire?

After almost ten years as one of the most celebrated upcoming Scandinavian artists Annika von Hausswolff might still be young (born in 1967) but her influence on the new art photography has been immense. Maybe it’s because of the amount of layers in her art – critics like to have something to talk about – maybe it’s because of the pure aeshtetic qualities, or maybe it’s something harder to define.

In recent time she has been moving away from photography, hinting that digital photo might not have what she needs to express her self. She has successfully transferred her world into installations, and it’s a rather safe bet that we’ll get to see more of her on that scene.

Still, von Hausswolff’s photography is very much the essence of her work. Her photos are pseudo documentary. One of her most famous works Hey Buster! What do you know about desire? depicts a German Sheppard guarding a covered up female corpse on a beach. At first glance it looks like a snap shot, perhaps taken by an onlooker or as a part of a crime scene investigation, but it is in fact arranged in detail by the artist.

This ambiguous attitude is important to the artist. Besides examining a world of threats, violence and isolation, von Hausswolff asks questions about the very nature of photography in general, and documentary photography specifically. Is it relevant to view the camera as an independent witness, the way we’ve been raised to believe by the main stream news media? Do we really know what happened just by what it looks like?

Fear of The Dark

This Flickr project exploring ”the doom-and-gloom agenda of London’s Evening Standard” was found through Erik Stattins blog. It’s thought provoking and entertaining at the same time.

When Critics Go Bananas

This years spring exibition at Liljevalchs, in Stockholm, opened this weekend. I haven’t been able to go yet, but it is said to be one of the best shows in recent years. I’m looking forward to a visit as soon as I can find some time for it.

In Jessica Kempe’s review in Dagens Nyheter I found this gem: “Maybe Morgan Stenman’s painted banana is a story about the kind of processing workout that distinguishes the contributions of this year. A banana who’s bananiness [My note: YES, she writes “bananiness”!] has been tried so many times that in the end it just lies there. On it’s back, bananish through and through…”

In the words of John Cleese: IT’S A DEAD PARROT!!!!

Picture this: Nicholas Roerich

Nicholas Konstantinovich Roerich (1874-1947) belonged to the most prominent of the artists who remade the art scene in stagnating tsarist Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. He was, however, not a radical. When revolution struck in 1917 he was already in Finland with his family, and didn’t return because he thought that it would be to dangerous. Instead he travelled to the USA, and then on to India where he lived for many years until his death.

Together with his wife Helena he founded a theosofical society in New York, and through the years it became apparant that it was within mysticism and symbolism that his art belonged. He was a passionate adversary to “academics, sentimentalists and realists”.

Mount of Five Treasures (Two Worlds), painted in 1933, is a typical example of Roerich’s later work. The physical place is probably located in the Himalayas, but the important thing for Roerich was the inner mountains that every person must climb. The painting is part of several suites of mysterious mountain pictures.

On a sidenote: the works of Nicholas Roerich inspired horror fiction writer HP Lovecraft to one of his most important shorts tories, At the Mountains of Madness.

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

Hip to Be Square

The role of commercial art galleries is under scrutiny. Earlier this week I wrote about the debate in Sweden concerning how the press deals with young upcoming artists connected to hip galleries, like Andrehn-Shiptjenko. In retrospect I have to admit to taking the discussion less seriously than it deserved, but I blame Marianne Lindberg de Geer for that.

In a devastating review of upcoming New York artist Ellen Alfest, at the übercool gallery Bellwether, Paddy Johnson at Art Fag City complains that "she's made a series of very boring representational paintings that exhibit poor attention to surface and fail to bring any depth to the subject matter depicted."

Johnson continues by questioning if Alfest would have gotten such overwhelming reviews in the leading papers if she had exhibited her work at a less high profile gallery. Needless to say, his conclusion is: probably not.

Though I can’t really have a qualified opinion on Ellen Alfest’s art, it seems to me that there is something strange going on here. Something beyond the hyping of certain artists, which may become very stupid when seen in retrospect, but that is another issue… The hyping of certain galleries is much more disturbing, all in all. To judge the art by who the artist is, is probably unavoidable. To judge the artist by who his gallerist is, most certainly isn’t.

The Lightness of Simplicity

It looks like Miró at first glance. The paintings, drawings and etchings of Håkan Berg uses simplicity – not minimalism! – to evoke feelings from deep within. But unlike Miró, Berg has a certain lightness to him. It’s as if he wants to say that emotions can be hard to handle, complicated, but not necessarily from some mysterious, Freudian underworld.

Berg’s art also deals with issues of communication, knowledge and perception. He goes in between the eye and the world. The simplest things can be the most important, even though they’re hardly noticeable at first.

For the catalogue to his 2000 exibition in Paris, Thomas Kjellgren wrote: “he paints with the crayons of life on the canvases of light”, and I can find no better way to describe it.

Brilliant Street Art from Rebar

Through The Art Blog today I found out about this brilliant piece of public art. The Rebargroup reclaim public spaces for more people friendly use than originally intended by city planners and such.

Their latest project consists of rebuilding a single parking space into a very small park. It’s fully documented with a manual for anyone who would like to try it in their own home town. Now they have plans to make a fully functional corporate conference room submerged seven feet into the desert floor.

I don’t know what to say. I’m in awe…

Picture this: Eduard Manet

Eduard Manet (1832-1883) has been called ”the first modern painter”, but according to himself he was only trying to be truly original and not copy anyone else. Despite working roughly at the same time as the romantic painters, like Gustav Courbet, he had much more in common with later artists, like Monet and Renoir. His vision was narrative rather than interpretive, and his work was often seen as to cold by the critics of his time.

The Execution of The Emperor Maximilian (1867) is a perfect example of Manet’s style. It’s obviously a comment on Goya’s famous The Third of May 1808. The big difference between Goya and Manet is that the later doesn’t show any apparent sympathies for either side of the conflict depicted. Manet produces a distant view – almost photographic – where Goya made a passionate political statement.

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

Kickin' it DaDa Style

I'm not much for reposts, but I found this article through Artstash, and felt that I had to share it. Apparantly a 76 year old artist has made it his business to destroy Marcel Duchamp's Fontain. First time he pissed in it, now he attacked it with a hammer.

The hammer attack is just strange, but the pissing seem to have some sort of meaning, at least at first glance. But, then again, not really. Duchamp turned the urinal upside down for a reason: to make unusable art from a usable every day object. I guess the attacker wanted to show that he failed, but that doesn't make the concept behind Fontain a failure, does it? And for Duchamp the concept was everything.

But, I'm probably just overanalyzing things here. There's a lot of crazy people out there...

Beware of the dark side...

The weirdest story in the Swedish art world today must surely be this article in Dagens Nyheter (Sweden’s largest morning daily). Renowned artist Marianne Lindberg de Geer - with a little backup from on of Sweden’s best selling artists of all time, Ernst Billgren - accuses the paper’s art critic Bo Madestrand of being part of a conspiracy. Lindberg de Geer claims that a committé made up of people from the art elite “decide who gets to live and who must die in the art life of Sweden”.

And it’s all because of Johan Nobell. Well, actually, it’s because of him getting good reviews from Madestrand (who might, or might not, be part of the conspiracy that Lindberg de Geer is talking about). It’s all very bizarre.

Nobell’s art isn’t really my cup of tea, but nobody can deny his ability to paint. According to his gallery Andrehn-Shiptjenko (that is basically the “death star” of the art conspiracy…) he is "considered to be one of Scandinavia’s most original painters to have emerged in recent years and has indeed developed a pictorial language all of his own. His small to medium size canvases are ambiguous, quasi-narrative and oscillating between the figurative and the abstract. Being to a large extent influenced by the aesthetics as well as the economic geography of the American landscape his paintings are at once mysterious and stark."

That maybe so, but it’s hard not to wonder if this is what the stuff Dalí scribbled down while talking on the phone would look like…

The Link List

I decided to make a more extensive link list to be kept in this post. My favourites will still be in the sidebar but this way I can keep editing the list and recategorize it as much as I want. As far as the Artists' blog section goes I will try to limit this to artists that actually write about their work, not only publish pictures of it.

Art Sites
Artnet - the best art resource on the web today
The Artchive - search engine for art and artists
Olga's Gallery - bios and pictures from the world history of art

Art blogs
Artopia - probably the best art blog on the web right now
The Art Blog - keeping a creative eye on the world of art
JMG ArtBlog - a very extensive artblog
Bloggy - a decent art blog with a lot of new stuff
BibliOdyssey - not really an art blog, but still... an art blog, in some way
Pop Experiment - not much of a blog but a very good visual arts archive
Heinrich Schmidt - A vidoblog about contemporary art
Art Fag City - New York art news, reviews and gossip
Drawn! - a group blog about drawings and illustrations
Wooster Collective - a celebration of street art
ArtCrimes - a graffiti collection

Artists' blogs
Diacritic - contemporary media art design cultre in Southeast Asia and beyond
Semiophile - a Sidney based artist and his blog
Mike Mathers Artblog - an american artist and his work

Personal stuff
Vänsterpartiet - the place I work
Flamman - weekly journal where I write
kommunity.nu - a nice community
Ali Esbati - the best Swedish blog on politics and culture
Kalle Larsson - the second best Swedish blog on politics

Innocence Is No Excuse

Kim Simonssons meter high sculptures are pretty creepy. Kids with hollowed out eyes and blank faces, or wearing masks, is a rather disturbing concept, and the way the artist executes it makes it all the more effective.

An obvious parallel can be seen in the art of Ufuoma Urie, but Simonsson takes it to another level. Urie’s dolls are just plain scary, while Simonsson has much more to say about society today. His world is not a fantasy world, even though the imagery draws heavily from Japanese manga and anime figures. The settings are urban, and suburban, areas and the dolls are iconic symbols of popular culture.

The narrative is pretty open ended. Simonsson doesn’t seem to be interested in telling us all the answers. That being said, he isn’t clueless. The combination of cute and childish dolls, with scary features and accessories, in a well known environment, is obviously a comment on society and innocence lost.

Spoils of The Revolution

A full page ad in one of Swedens biggest newspapers today brags about ”high prices at russian auction”. I would say that’s an understatement.

Sure, there is a lot of good russion art from the 19th century, such as that of the highly acclaimed Ilya Repin. But 200k euro for a painting of the Royal Palace in Stockholm by Aizazovsky is not only overprized, it’s simply stupid. The guy produced over 6.000 paintings during his lifetime, most of which are romantic moonlight-over-the-stormy-sea-stuff. He could hardly paint landscapes and often failed miserably at portraits.

Another 200k euro for a Pasternak is a little more reasonable, but still rather strange in my opinion. 150k euro for the comparatively unknown Harlamov, or Mailiavin is a lot of money.

There is obviously a strong market for Russian art right now. But it’s hard not to get the feeling that a lot of it is pure speculation. It’ll be interesting to see when the bubble bursts.

He's Got The Shine

This is good. This is really, really good. Johan Thurfjells art is a quiet celebration of afterthought and slow, thorough work. His miniatures are literary small worlds, placed on a table surface. A Swedish person grown up in the 1970s might think of “Vilse i pannkakan”, if I were to use an obscure reference.

His art is full of references to popular culture, but without that shallow feeling of cliché that is often the result of such cross overs. His video Do You Have The Shine? is made to look like a trailer to a computer game, and features the viewer in the role of Danny in the famous tricycle scene from Kubrick’s master piece The Shining. It’s a haunting setting for an examination of perception, and the processes of the human mind.

Thurfjell works in many media. He makes drawings, sculptures, videos and installation pieces. The results are different, but the feelings of sadness and melancholy are always there.

If you don’t like this, there’s something wrong with you.

Picture this: Sol LeWitt

Sol LeWitt (1928-) is probably the smartest and most consequent of the minimalists. In the 1960s he was part of the uprising against Warhol’s Pop Art and Pollock’s Expressionism. His artistic focus is not on the exploration of the human mind, or of modern society, but on mathematics, patterns and geometry. In the 1960s he became recognized for his long series of sculptures combining white hollow cubes connected to each other in repeating patterns. In theory these works could be have been developed infinitly into larger and larger structures.

Lines in two directions in five colors on five colors with all their combinations (1981) is a later work in the very same spirit. Sol LeWitt, unlike some concept art, doesn’t need deep interpretations. Most of what he does is pretty much what it looks like. If there is a deeper thought connected to it, it’s most often just to make the viewer repeat the pattern, or the mathematical struture, that is built into the work in question.

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

Mona Lisa Overdrive

While researching the article on graffiti below i stumbled upon The Graffiti Creator that turned out to be a surprisingly addictive way to spend half an hour or more.

It also turned my attention to a new aspect of the traditional graffiti culture: web signatures, banners and avatars. You might think I'm crazy at this point but bare with me and you'll see what I'm talking about...

The internet is full of discussion groups, forums and online games. Most of the participants are very far from the typical graffiti painter from the streets, but the techniques and style sheets are basically the same, only transfered from spray cans to Photoshop filters.

There are no clear borders between those who just put a funny cartoon in their signature and those who spend hours in front of the screen creating original graphics topped off with lightning effects that not even the programmers at Adobe knew were possible. Between these extremes is the most common form of signature - some stolen popular computer game character or manga figure heavily reworked through filters and effects. This year "scan lines" or interlaced layers seem to be the most common way to do it.

It's clearly not all signatures and avatars that qualify as art, but it's hard to draw the line. It's all somewhere in between art, design, commercials and "funny stuff". The same is true for web design in general. Most pages are very basic in design (like this blog, for example...) and some are beautiful works of pure art, like this.

The internet is still a very new medium, and all of these areas are in fast development. In another ten years or so the estetics of the net will have changed drastically. I'm sure of it. By then the difference between commercial sites, personal blogs and art projects will probably be much clearer. I'm not sure weather or not this is a good thing - it doesn't really matter, since it will happen any way.

But the eclectic culture of internet estetics might not last very long, so be sure to enjoy it now.

Note: The featured signature was found at Geek Forum and published with kind permission from damF.

Smooth Criminals

I will probably write something more extensive on graffiti and street art at a later date, but I thought it would be nice to offer some nice links right now. Some of the best graffiti in the world is collected at Art Crimes. If you browse the site more thoroughly you will probably notice the main artistic difficulty with this art form: that 90 % of all graffiti suck! The good stuff – like the featured piece by Graphis from São Paulo – or this painting from the early 1990s by Swedish painter Dwane (who later moved away from the streets into the warmth of the art galleries) – is really good, but most of what you can see on the city walls is pure crap.

It’s not hard to understand why the situation looks like this. Most graffiti artists start to paint in their early teens, and quit in their early twenties, just when they’re starting to get good at it. A lot of paintings are produced under pressure, having to watch for police and guards, or in bad weather conditions. Never the less, you have to look hard for the good stuff, and I do think that graffiti would probably have a better name if the public got to know the really good paintings too.

Another problem with graffiti is that the very strict rules that apply to the different styles sometimes make it pretty boring. That is probably the reason for the development of so called “street art” which is a broader concept. In street art, design is no longer everything. The subject behind the surface is just as important as the execution of the painting.

Some of the best Swedish street art can be found here. The most famous street artist coming out of Stockholm is probably Akay, who is a little to anarchist for my taste, but still produces some of the most theoretically challenging street art.

Nothing new this week

I can't blog this week. I'll be working around the clock with this. Next post will be up januari 11th. Check out the new logotype for Vänsterpartiet in the meantime.

Cheers!

Gunnel - she's so hot right now!

Let’s talk about Gunnel Wåhlstrand. Everyone else is doing it. She is the kind of artist that I really, really would like to trash, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Her large drawings grows on you, and her virtuosity with ink and brush is nothing less than mindblowing.

My first impression of Wåhlstrands work was that it was pointless. Monochrome photorealistic inkdrawings? I mean, come on! Didn’t that concept die once and for all when Gerhard Richter turned to abstraction?

The comparison to Richter is unavoidable. It’s the first thing that strikes you when looking at a Wåhlstrand drawing. There are hints of Tansey too, and perhaps even the slightest bit of Hamerhöj, but she owes so much to Richter that one could almost put up a warning flag for plagiarism. And also like Richter, she has been talking in interviews about moving into abstraction, but explains that she “is afraid” to do so.

But when you come beyond that first impression, something happens. Something different. Something new. First of all: her craftmanship is beyond belief. It’s actually better than Richter or Tansey, and that’s saying a lot. It’s so good that the viewer is sucked into her pictures, being forced to examine them in detail, taking them in, stroke by stroke. Second: where Richter uses a direct approach to comment on the times and events of the world in a straight up political way, Wåhlstrand paints her own personal world, with pictures from her family albums. Through these pictures she also makes a more subtle comment on the narrowmindedness of the traditional bourgoise family. It’s not better than the direct approach, but different, kind of like the differens between Brecht and Becket.

So, why not: let’s talk about Gunnel Wåhlstrand. Let’s keep talking about her.