| Merlin Carpenter | |||||||
| Media Guy |
Avant
Disclaimer: I am in Matthew Collings's new book Art Crazy Nation and his Art Crazy Nation Show in Milton Keynes. So it maybe a bit ungrateful for me to suggest that he is an art buffoon. Collings has presented a vast number of TV programmes in the UK over the last fifteen years and also written dodgy books and magazine articles about contemporary art. He writes in a journalistic, diaristic style derived from Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, Richard Branson, Jack Kerouac, Tama Janowitz, Jay McInerny, Tom Wolfe and Nicky Haslam. He talks over the head of art world insiders direct to an imaginary bourgeois audience who retain their common sense about "Modern Art's" supposed excesses. This has become more and more pronounced over the course of Matthew's career. The privatised official culture represented by Channel 4 needed someone to translate emerging art contexts into more-of-the-same fun, to rewrite history for the new Blairite ruling class. He has become a national institution. I regret that I see Matthew's work as being right-wing these days since I like him and I feel attracted towards his insane speediness. But it is so normal for journalists and critics to drift rightwards in the UK that you can't fail to notice.
His opinions on art are occasionally spot on, the type of things you do not see written down but always hear people say. For instance he talks about Gallery owner Maureen Paley's foreign accent when speaking to German collectors. I also like his explanation of why his photo is always on the cover of his own books: to make them like cookery books, with Matthew as celebrity chef Delia Smith. Food, Art and Lifestyle are joined at the hip.
Collings is infamous for naming Richie Edwards lead singer of Manic Street Preachers on national TV. A mistake that must have rung alarm bells for his non-art audience. One would only have to signal the many inaccuracies and casual disregard for facts in his new book, including the part on myself where there are eight errors in four pages, to render it more or less useless as an archival document. It therefore cannot serve an informative purpose of any kind for art history, let alone for a critically informed analysis. Moreover his own standpoint becomes indistinguishable in a self-imposed morass of indifference between ironic critique and celebration of celebrity.
Collings developed his basic ideas in the mid-eighties as editor of Artscribe, a specialist publication mainly concerned with German and American art. The explosion of art into mainstream culture in nineties London was rather a surprise for his generation, even though they were instrumental in creating the conditions for it all to go off. Matthew and Sarah Kent might be seen as the parents of the popularization process having audiences approaching half a million each, Sarah with Time Out and Matthew with the chattering classes who had tuned in to BBC 2's Newsnight and drifted into The Late Show (1989-1995). The art features he made for this programme were a curiosity. They were not quite a celebration of young British art but did introduce some of the key themes and players as well as cover relatively serious art history like Donald Judd. The style became gradually more relaxed and chatty in line with wider changes in the UK media.
Whether his generation of critics paved the way inadvertently or strategically, initially it was not clear for them how to respond to the success of the big push. In 1987 Matthew Collings and Stuart Morgan were still saying that there was no such thing as 'British art' (True Brit: An Enquiry into National Character, Artscribe no. 61, 1987). The market-led lifestyle culture embodied in Frieze could only have been a Frankenstein monster in the eighties dreams of Collings and Morgan (his successor as editor). Where Artscribe had been terrified of "theory" and reverential towards art, Frieze instrumentalized both for the sake of design, style and apolitical effectiveness. The change in Matthew was gradual but obvious. In 1990 he made the bizarre decision to go back to art school, to do an postgraduate MA at Goldsmiths. This represented a desire to be a "Goldsmith's artist" on the most pathetic level. But more importantly, it was his turning point between being a consumer of foreign art theory and slowly starting to pick up support for the attempt to become an actor in the emerging London scene. After some more years at The Late Show, which publicly played out his shift from international consumer to national player on the celebrity circuit, Matthew eventually came out and supported yBa with gusto in his 1997 book Blimey!
However his work has always simultaneously carried a kind of "atmosphere" of criticism towards yBa. The breathless enthusiasm of Blimey! was quite easily readable as bad faith: Tracey, isn't it amazing, ha-ha. But, since he has never specified this, only implied it by over-celebration, it has all been rather less useful than venturing a single clear opinion, even a wrong one. He went through the whole nineties without ever once saying "stop".
True, in the new book, there is more criticism. He rips into Michael Landy and Tacita Dean, and not before time ."A gate, that's interesting, I must photograph it", he imagines her thinking. But it is not that simple. The wind has changed. Collings is trying to respond to a backlash against the first two generations of yBa that already happened four years ago and was brewing before that (see Poster Studio, "They're All Going Down," tzk no. 22, 1996). Art Crazy Nation seeks to include post-yBa critical groupings within a revamped third or fourth Generation yBa culture, which I am also now apparently part of. But in fact these later developments had already terminated yBa, which leaves Matthew looking quite exposed.
In order to include these developments he now has to write about "Marxists" and "politically correct" artists and writers (like John Roberts, Julian Stallabrass and JJ Charlesworth) with the same cynical tone previously reserved for moronic entrepreneurs. I think this has confused him, and puts him very close to Sunday Times/Rupert Murdoch territory. This outdated skepticism also makes his judgements irrelevant for a serious discussion about and within the contexts he addresses. Not accidentally, the "Marxists" he chooses to mention are Marxists lite whose main concept is self-promotion. Perhaps he guesses that amongst these opportunists could be the Matthew of the future.
One can see Art Crazy Nation as an attempt to lasso various parts of post yBa London art-related subculture (including ones I am attached to) and drag them back inside the old killerfence. But not only do these scenes anyhow not coalesce, unfortunately he does not know enough about any particular one of them to explain who any of these people are and why they do what they do. All he sees are the images put out by public relations departments and jacket blurbs. He sees what he is allowed to see, which he writes down, plus errors. In the few cases where there is more to be seen he has lost his way entirely.
Garde
Today I saw the Art Crazy Nation Show at Milton Keynes Gallery. I immediately recognised it as, well, bullshit. Nice, light and fashionable, though.
Milton Keynes is a city designed twenty-five years ago, resembling a cross between Liam Gillick sculpture and Argos. I was struck by how it had to built be sufficiently far away for there to be no chance it could merge into London. But it is nevertheless a satellite, full of family houses all the more depressing since they were built a couple of years after the death of utopian planning. A suitable testbed for a new type of curatorial amnesia.
According to the press release it is the first show Matthew has curated for an institution, and he seems to have enjoyed it. He has managed to convey his idea that art is a serious form of light entertainment. Nothing jarred or felt too heavy. Sarah Staton's Krazy and Gilbert and George's Leafers looked great. My work looked all right, but maybe out of place. But even the bad art was semi-OK looking. The Sarah Lucas and Jake and Dinos Chapman pieces were dumb but not really annoying. Contributions by Bank and John Russell/Fabienne Audéoud offered a feeble whiff of alternativeness.
However, I ask myself whether Matthew's style produces any serious results in terms of actual thought, and not only the kind produced by accident and against the grain. Compare Collings to Benjamin H.D. Buchloh. Does the former's adherence to the surface actually change the terms of the artistic paradigm, as Buchloh demanded of Warhol, or preserve at least the hope of doing so?
And there is a more general question. Who could police a notion of history that is more ideologically rigorous? Who controls history after a bourgeois gossip history which fully includes its own opposite and is Teflon-coated? Matthew tries to see himself from all sides and imagine criticisms like "breezy liberal". But his self-criticism is manic self-vaccination. It also does not work as dialectics because there is no initial proposition. We live with the media, but the directions from which you observe and involve yourself with that world can be very different. Buchloh centre-stages this area in his recent book. He describes the moment after the negations of conceptual art when a space opened up within the media:
"a space where the avant-garde's former claim to disregard the persistence of social memory embedded in institutional practices and discursive conventions has been exchanged for the recognition that it is precisely from the reflection of these conventions that the only remaining potentials for resistance can be mobilized." (Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry, p. 335).
But far from negotiating this space, on the soft border from where a dialectic can be tracked, Collings slips into relations of authority, following a line that proceeds from Bob Dylan to The Guardian, from Tony Blair to George W. Bush. What is art history? This book, part-published by David Bowie and launched in Selfridges, only serves to commodify a snapshot of a conjuncture. What it fails to do is play out in the text the contradictions inherent in the relationships involved. For all Buchloh's limitations at least he tries to stay on top of the conditions of his own ennunciation.
For example Collings allows himself to talk about "punky, working class origins" in the Art Crazy Nation Show booklet. What does he mean? Punk or working class? The landscape he paints is terribly ill-defined. And he never says which artists are able to articulate this landscape and which ones are just fodder. Being an example of something is not the same as thinking about it. He talks about "us" a lot. "Us Brits". "As a society, we". "A Nation of art lovers". "Art Crazy Nation". Surely society was abolished by Thatcher? I am not defined by nationhood and do not want to be. Out of the three problematic concepts "Art", "Crazy" and "Nation", the third is most illuminating about Collings's milieu.
He is right to point out the neo-Darwinistic notion that anybody has potentially more cultural power than anyone else:
"Banal ideas, wrong ideas, popular ideas - anything will do as long as its plugged directly into the present and there are sparks coming out of the wire."(This is Modern Art, 1999, p. 34).
But when is this "present"? And for what audience? This process obviously breaks down outside a certain middle-class culture and its related economic conditions. You do not lose anything, certainly not aesthetically, by clearly stating the contingency of the bubble. The offensiveness of yBa, which Matthew only partly recognised, was that it installed low-resolution fake alternative cultures in the place of a dead culture and expected "the nation" - meaning people - to accept it. People did accept the sense of ideological clearing, the Mr. Blobby moment, but not what was put in its place. And the point Matthew misses today is that trying to keep Damien Hirst's 1988 Freeze alive with all its ideological inconsistencies is just impossible fourteen years later. Trying to keep something open closes it down. Collings tells us that people like Sarah Lucas retain some charisma. That just proves the opposite.
You can portray him as BritArt's Judas or defender. It doesn't matter. He repeats time and time again the eighties commonplace that art has changed, that it has jettisoned history and that anything is possible. It is not that this is untrue, it just depends where you see things from. Commonplaces like these are hangovers from previous more significant shifts. Unless there is a critical relation to the moment of conceptual art and/or its modernist antecedents, and a complementary attempt to unearth the genesis and development of postmodernism in the sense of the media's overtaking of the meaning functions of art, then to even address the subject of a historical break becomes tautologous. There is nothing to compare it to. You can't describe art from within art.
This tautology leads to mythologization and the reintroduction of notions of quality on another level. The amnesiac closed circle has an inevitable side-effect: an actual swing towards the old-fashioned that occurs once the historical contradictions are buried.
So what are the signs of this? The nicest one is that Collings has included three old fart abstract painters in the book and show. They are described as "marginalised" and "non-ironic". The possibility of this inclusion could be seen as a positive result of Collings's shift to the right. The assistant at Milton Keynes Gallery told me that one of these three, Gary Wragg, was my teacher at art school. This is another Collings inaccuracy, but it is true I spoke to him one afternoon in 1986 and he seemed quite nice. His paintings are brutal abstracts that do little for a renewal of painting, but their inclusion does at least nod towards half-recognised and nearly-repressed surplus-value. In the book Wragg struts in front of his paintings like a pre-ironic rooster.
Significantly, too, Matthew has now become a fan of superconservative Evening Standard art critic Brian Sewell; he is warmly praised in Art Crazy Nation. He also crops up in the show as a waxwork made by two ex-St. Martins students.
Another change is Matthew's recent affirmations of unexplained retinal or formal qualities:
"The works in this show are very different to one another. Some are more aesthetic. Some are more poetic. But with all of them I think that there is a secret visual quality which is important. The nation is crazy about art now, but they don't know what it is they are looking at." (Milton Keynes Gallery Bulletin).
In the early eighties UK art critic Peter Fuller rejected all modernist art, replacing it with an unbroken tradition of English Romanticism and the "sacred". Is Matthew tiptoeing in the same direction? For several years he has written a diary for Modern Painters, the magazine Fuller founded. And this "secret visual quality" is very dubious. Such qualities exist, but are not necessarily carriers of anything except money. For them to be more one would have to start by saying what they are. Collings just follows and totally simplifies the recent shifts in art historical discourse towards visuality and medium specificity. What sort of tradition of art writing are we actually dealing with here? Matthew is a writer, maybe a good one. But should writing be about a relation to history and a specific notion of cultural political potentialities or about serving up a salad of interestingly ironic Great British compost?
For some of "us" the challenge in all of this is not to find a language that is invisible to Collings. This has already happened. It is more to find a language that obliterates him when it surfaces. It needs to track the inevitable contortions of the media as shamelessly as he does, but never make his right turns. In this book intentions are lost and become examples of intentionality. More sophisticated models of intersubjectivity and work within and around the media are already active. These models depend on precisely the kind of detailed, contextual knowledge that Matthew denies.
Merlin Carpenter 2002
Thanks to Anthony Davies and Isabelle Graw.
This text was published in German In Texte zur Kunst No. 45, March 2002. www.textezurkunst.de
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