Holzer is renowned for her large scale illuminated displays of text. The offer to install a show at Blenheim Castle must have been irresistible. Ancestral home of Winston Churchill, it was built to commemorate war victories. In contrast, her art expresses skepticism about military power. As one critic puts it “This is not a subtle show, but Blenheim is not a subtle building.”
Some critics clearly had big expectations of Frieze London. Isn’t this the art fair that helps define the cutting edge of new art? By that measure, it disappoints “[I]f this is the new, the new is starting to look old and jaded”. Others are a lot more relaxed “This is a selling fair after all … Frieze is like one big hodge-podge of a jumble sale, and like a jumble sale offers many delights and discoveries.”
When Jasper Johns was starting out abstract expressionism reigned supreme, asking ‘big’ questions like ‘what does painting do’. Johns had different interests, painting mundane objects like flags. Such paintings, argues Morgan Meis, are elusive. “.. if I paint the number ‘2’ on a canvas, have I brought that number into existence? Is the painting now a ‘2’? Or is it a painting of a ‘2’?
Art does not uncover what is hidden, or resolve itself into clear, declarative statements – this means this, that means that. Rather, in art, meaning is a glimpse of reality, like something seen through a periscope. Periscope (Hart Crane), is not a puzzle to be solved. It is, in the end, a simple painting composed of simple images. Yet those images are resonant with metaphors of the sea, of depths, of longing, loss, secrets and the mystery of meaning.”
A major retrospective of the American artist Jasper Johns, “Something Resembling Truth” has just opened at the Royal Academy of Arts. This essay is reproduced with the permission of the Royal Academy and Morgan Meis.
Controversy is a key part of Dinos and Jake Chapman’s oeuvre – as is their Goya fixation. Their latest show, which this writer thinks puts them “at the top of their game”, features numerous Goya prints to which they have added colour or glitter – “possibly the prettiest thing the Chapmans have ever produced”. And then there are bronze casts of … suicide-bomb vests. More controversy, one presumes.