Tim Burton As Artist

I have always enjoyed Tim Burton’s movies — and I am looking forward with anticipation to his “Alice” — but not in any fanatical way: they often have a conceptual similarity about them that detracts for me.   Besides being a filmmaker, Burton is also an artist and the NY Museum of Modern Art has honoured him with an “expansive” retrospective.  Ken Johnson, the NY Times art critic, is not impressed.

Given the tremendous visual appeal of Mr. Burton’s movies, you would hope that “Tim Burton,” the Museum of Modern Art’s expansive retrospective of his noncinematic art, would be equally exciting. Alas, it is a letdown. Focused mainly on hundreds of drawings dating from his teenage years to the present and including paintings, sculptures, photographs and a smattering of short films on flat screens, it is an entertaining show and a must for film buffs and Burton fans. To see the raw material from which the movies evolved is certainly illuminating. But there is a sameness to all Mr. Burton’s two- and three-dimensional output that makes for a monotonous viewing experience.

That’s a shame, but I am not altogether surprised.

 

 

Sun 1

This is as close as we will get to the sun in Vancouver this week!

Shavings

Triage

Triage

Losing a lover is like
losing a limb
or a necessary organ;
take whatever drugs you want
to ease the pain,
it still hurts like hell
in the morning
alone.

Taking a new lover is like
another transplant:
the dose of anti-rejection drugs you need
just grows and grows.
And as the skin thickens
it takes a harder push
each time
for the needle’s point to pierce your cover;
and each drop of blood seems redder
and more precious
than the last
until you decide
at last
that the payoff is not worth the pain
and you consign that part
of you
to an oblivion
that is not complete
to a decision that is not whole-hearted
to a diagnosis that hurts
like a lover leaving.

The Artist As Libertine: Man Ray

Oh to be in New York, now that there is a new exhibition of Man Ray’s drawings, paintings, sculptures, photographs, “rayographs,” poetry, and short films!  The show, and review in Fast Company, reminds us of one of the most original — and certainly free-est — artists of the last century.

The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows, 1915–16, oil on canvas

Wall With Window

“Wall With Window”

Street Art 1

Southern Comfort

It was a slam bam thank you ma’am kind of night.
“It’s alright,” she said with a slight frisson of uncertainty perhaps
as she unwraps and taps the money-box on the dresser.
He pays to caress her, to possess her as she bumps and grinds
and too quickly finds the kind of passion paid for.
He wants more before he’ll leave: sixteen and still hard.
But she’s on guard, body barred against free love.
Push came to shove.  Above his pleas she screamed and screamed
until the apartment teemed with neighbours and passers-by
who wondered why this nigger came by and by to be in a white girl’s room.

It’s a warm, hormone-rushing, mosquito-swarming kind of night.
Fox-fire bright, passions tightly wound and sprung.
No brass bells are rung, no masses sung, but masses gather to enjoy
the black boy toy with the last of his time on a slippery slope
as the hempen rope grips and gropes for his hopeless neck.

Did The Art Market Go Crazy Again?

After a year of bad results followed by a rebound this Fall, it seems the high art market may have recovered its old nerve. I haven’t got the details yet but I hear via Twitter that Andy Warhol’s painting of dollar bills made a phenomenal $43.7m against an estimate of $8-$12m at Sotheby’s New York tonight! That’s bizarre and shows that common sense has failed in the art market once again. Plus ca change, plus le meme chose.

Update: Here is the NYT story on the sale.

For Remembrance Day, On Seeing A Photograph

You were young men in the Guards
treading water in wretched trenches
swinging kitbags and rifles and broad silly grins

so young
that two billion volumes single-spaced wouldn’t be enough
to list all of life’s treasures
you haven’t experienced yet
and still you would die
right then
right there
doing right
or so you thought
as you lay where
no-one could tell where
mud ended and blood began

three and four generations removed,
we lay wreathes for your wraiths
on a hollow day in November
while the parades and the poppies
hallucinate
an annual landscape of memory

profound today, gone tomorrow

and for three or four days the flowers fade
and the greenery browns at your memorials
and then the work crews come

young men and women with guarded futures
treading water at minimum wage
swinging brooms and shovels and black plastic bags

and when the work trucks leave
your memory has turned once again
to cold undecorated stone
and nothing can ever change
the fact
that you died before you started living.

Who’s Reading What?

I was looking at this site’s statistics this morning.  I  wasn’t surprised to see that coverage of Lucian Freud over the last year has drawn most views — by many thousands:  he is a popular and controversial painter.

What did surprise me, though, was how popular the Les Sapeurs du Congo post has been.   They are a truly fascinating social phenomenon.

Other posts that appear in the top half dozen include my image of “54 Stories of Old Ireland” (no idea where this is coming from), and the post on a pizza machine!

Na Pali Coast

Fleet In Fog

Wave 2

Signature

“Signature” (2009), acrylics on canvas, 20″ x 16″

Has Hirst Finally Passed His Best-Before Date?

I have written many times in many places how much I dislike nearly all of Damien Hirst’s oeuvre. And I have been rewarded by having to watch him become the first art billionaire. But finally, the hens may be coming home to roost. Look at these reviews of his latest exhibition…

Rachel Campbell-Jones: “The paintings are dreadful. Think Francis Bacon meets Adrian Mole. So why are these works now hanging in the Wallace Collection? What are they doing in the home of such masters as Rembrandt or Poussin, Titian or Fragonard? The answer is simple: they are by Damien Hirst. Take a step farther and a pale, silk-papered boudoir transforms into what feels more like a teenage boy’s bedroom. You can almost smell the brooding odours of existential angst. The artist who has made his reputation with shock now produces works that are shockingly bad.“

Tom Lubbock: “Damien Hirst has painted some paintings, entirely by hand. So far he has made his name with other kinds of art: with assemblages, mainly involving dead animals and pills, and paintings, painted by other people. But now he has risked his fame, with some paintings done by his own hand. They’re thoroughly derivative. Their handling is weak. They’re extremely boring. Hirst, as a painter, is at about the level of a not-very-promising, first-year art student. He is in his mid-forties. “

Sarah Crompton: “The problems with the exhibition begin when you study the paintings themselves. Although they have impact as a group, individually many of the paintings simply don’t pass muster. Details are tentatively painted; compositions fall apart under scrutiny. So it is brave of him to begin to paint in this way — but anyone who first encountered Hirst through these works would be entirely justified in wondering what all the fuss had been about.”

Adrian Searle: “Damien Hirst’s paintings are deadly dull … Hirst’s paintings lack the kind of theatricality and grandeur that made Bacon succeed. At its worst, Hirst’s drawing just looks amateurish and adolescent. His brushwork lacks that oomph and panache that makes you believe in the painter’s lies. He can’t yet carry it off. Whatever his borrowings, Hirst did all this himself, unaided by his armies of assistants. He fills up his art with dead things: even the iguanas look stuffed. But these paintings are a memento mori for a reputation.”

Hirst can of course ignore these reviews with a shake of his heavily-laden bank accounts.  But it must hurt, nonetheless.

The next day, the New York Times was asking whether Conceptual Art had jumped the shark tank?  As Dennis Dutton writes:  “I can’t help regarding medicine cabinets, vacuum cleaners and dead sharks as reckless investments. Somewhere out there in collectorland is the unlucky guy who will be the last one holding the vacuum cleaner, and wondering why.”

New Store

After experimenting with Etsy as a store for my artworks, I have decided to move on. I have selected RedBubble, and my store is here.

The great advantage of RedBubble is that they allow me to offer a significantly wider range of products, from postcards to posters, at a range of prices. They take care of the printing and the shipping.

Please give the store a look. I have quite a few items already posted and I am preparing a lot more.

Back From Travel

Just back from almost a month in Europe.   We cruised from Spain to Italy and France, before driving around England (and a bit of Wales).  I’ll have more to say about all that in the next few days.

I’ll also be posting some of the images I collected during the trip — the first ten or so can already be found at http://www.pbase.com/jak_king/europe_2009.

As we sailed into Naples early one morning, we were offered this gift of sunrise at Mount Vesuvius:

The Business of Art

There has been a recent change in the blogroll (over on the right —>).  I have added a “Jak’s Store To Buy Prints” link which goes to my brand new shop at http://jakking.etsy.com.

I have a few photographs and art prints there right now, and I’ll add more as I can.  If I can work out the shipping, I’ll also put up some paintings.

Hope you enjoy them!

The VAG Today

There is so much good stuff going on at the Vancouver Art Gallery this season that is hard to swallow it all.   Luckily, we had already seen the Vermeer/Rembrandt exhibition on the ground floor, so we were able to head straight upstairs when we went today.

The second floor has two shows sharing the space:  Emily Carr and Jack Shadbolt on one side, with Stan Douglas’s photographs on the other.

It has taken me a long time to appreciate the art of Emily Carr.  I was just slow, I guess, and I now accept her as one of the masters.  Her eye is so keen and many of her designs simply radical.  They had a few of her First Nations’ village pictures, which I don’t care for.  But the work in the forest and with totems is exquisite.  I particularly liked a series of charcoal drawings.  I’m glad I have gotten this far with her.

The show looks, in part, at her influence on Jack Shadbolt and his reaction to that influence.  He definitely comes off second best.  In his other works, I just don’t care for the butterfly works; and some of the works looked like over-elaborated Miro paintings.  But an entire wall of large scale charcoal drawings called “India Suite” was wonderful.  As were “Voices” and “Silent Land“.

The other half of the second floor, and all third floor is given over to photographs;  large format works of the BC Interior by Stan Douglas, a wide chronological range of works by Anthony Hermandez of Los Angeles, and others from Andreas Gursky.  There were individual images that were simply superb, but overall I wasn’t so impressed.  A lot of the works touched on themes that I have photographed, especially by Gursky.  Technically, their works are far superior to mine.  But conceptually and artistically, I prefer my stuff.

Running from the ground floor up to the top of the gallery is an installation by Reece Terris consisting of six apartment layouts, one on top of the other, called “Ought Apartment”.  They represent interior design and living from the 1950s to today.  According to the Inflated Phrases of the VAG catalog:

“The work of Vancouver-based Reece Terris focuses on the relationship between constructed architectural spaces and our common experiences and encounters within them. Through amplifications or shifts in the function of an initial design, Terris’ work reconsiders utility in both object and place to create environments that highlight the larger cultural contexts implicit in our built environment.”

Hmmmm.  My gal and I agreed this was a disappointment.  We didn’t learn anything about architecture, culture, or even artistic endeavour from this VAG-commissioned work.

Still, it was a worthwhile visit.  We have a proactive Gallery and Board and they deserves our support.