I noticed this forthcoming item from MACK books, from which the dreary smeary painting above – like Anselm Kiefer's sad little sister in a hospital gown – seems fairly typical of the works collected within:
Celia Paul: Works 1975–2025. The prolific British painter’s body of work is collected in a luxurious and authoritative volume, alongside new texts by writers including Karl Ove Knausgaard, Hilton Als, Clare Carlisle, Edmund de Waal, as well as Paul herself.
Karl Ove Knausgaard's contribution to the volume was published recently in the New Yorker ("The World-Changing Gaze of Celia Paul"), an account of a couple of meetings between these two dedicated self-obsessives. It's a curious read, I have to say. The encounter of two such people has a sort of self-cancelling chemistry of tepid mutual admiration that is actually quite funny. True, I've never read any Knausgaard: there's been so much written about him that it has always seemed superfluous actually to read him talking about himself, and I'm pretty sure that Scandinavian "autofiction" is not my thing. Yeah, right, hilarious, you might say, coming from a guy who blogs; but there's one of those irregular verbs in there, isn't there? You know the sort of thing: I blog; you over-share; he navel-gazes...
I have to say that my reaction to painting like this is one of baffled amusement. I think I will never understand the criteria by which alleged excellence in contemporary art is judged. I mean, really? I keep coming across top-rated work that – to my admittedly untutored eye – seems little better than the sort of thing you'd see at the open day of a sixth-form college: well-intended, heartfelt – full marks for sincerity, youngster! – but short of real skill and with most of its pictorial appeal deriving from the accidental effects of a slapdash lack of control. But this much-lauded stuff is not the result of juvenile enthusiasm, but the deliberately faux-naïve, calculatedly cack-handed work of successful, fully-trained and competent artists who, it seems to me, are essentially faking the "authenticity" of outsider art (now there's irony for you), presumably to evade the charge of using shallow sophistication, facility and – yuk! – "beauty" in order to con us art-rubes and civilians into... Well, I'm never sure what it is we're being shielded from by this solicitous self-censorship. But, really, guys, there's no need! We couldn't afford your stuff even if we liked it.
But MACK is a prestigious photography and art publisher, Paul is a Big Name painter – not only (?) because of her former relationship with Lucian Freud – and that's a fairly A-list roster of contributors. Although admittedly they are also fans of Alice Neel, another painter currently in vogue whose faux-naïve daubings I simply do not "get". I am sufficiently humble, however, not to mention magnanimous and open-minded – I am a saint of self-deprecation, though I do say so myself – to concede that the problem may be mine, not theirs. After all, I do enjoy the work of Pierre Bonnard and his present-day admirers, like Andrew Cranston, which might well be seen to be open to the same criticisms. Oh well, as Oscar Wilde wrote to excuse the contradiction between Whistler's written theorising and his actual painted work: consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative...
It may be that I was irreversibly formed, aesthetically, by an early and enduring love for comics and commercial graphic art. I suppose you can't spend your impressionable years poring over the revved-up box art of plastic model kits, copies of War Picture Library, Mad, and then LP record sleeves, and not absorb something of their made-to-please values, shallow as they may be. So I tend to prefer art that takes reality, hypes it up a bit, even to the point of decorative abstraction, and makes you feel something positive on the spectrum from "Wow!" to "Interesting..." I'm not a fan of art that takes reality and distresses it, or depresses your mood, intentionally or not (apparently, Rothko's declared intention with his notorious paintings commissioned for the Seagram Building's Four Seasons restaurant was to "ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room"). But, in particular, I avoid obsessively self-therapeutic work that wants me to empathise with some heroically sad or damaged individual. But then I suppose that may just be the incorrigible and annoying white male in me speaking: "Come on, sad sack, never mind all that, let's play!".
Of his own work, Amsel said:
Commercial art can be and sometimes is art, but if someone hangs a poster, it is still a poster pretending to be something it's not. My work is basically for the printed page, and not for hanging in living rooms.
Well, that's as maybe ("consistency..."), but – resale value and insurance premiums aside – between an original Celia Paul painting and a Richard Amsel poster I know which I'd rather have hanging in my living room. Apparently a feature documentary is being made about Amsel, and I'll be interested to see it. I just hope it's more about the work (wow!) rather than the life (sad...).
4 comments:
Just watched "All that is sacred". Thoroughly enjoyed it. Thanks Mike.
I read a number of McGuanes in my 30s, and Brautigans in my teens, but had no idea there was this connection.
Mike
Harrison is the only one in the movie I really knew anything about, though I was aware of McGuane through their friendship. I also have a Jimmy Buffet track somewhere. (He is, or was, big in Florida, where I lived for a spell.)
Yes, I think you'd be looking a long time before you found anyone here who'd even heard of Jimmy Buffett, never mind listened to his music!
Brautigan was everywhere in the late 60s / early 70s -- a quick, pleasant, but unchallenging read for people too stoned to hold a book for more than 30 minutes, or to remember plot points for more than two chapters...
Mike
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