The Easel

7th May 2024

ESSAY: The kitsch we need

Morgan Meis | The-Easel

Ron Mueck, the hyper realist sculptor, is very popular with the gallery-going public. In contrast, critics throw at his work terms like “unrelentingly kitsch and sentimental”. Contributing Editor Morgan Meis acknowledges some of this criticism but thinks that sculptures like his Pregnant Woman or A Girl are important.

“Mueck is actually exploring a subject matter [pregnancy and infancy] that has been strikingly neglected hitherto. [I]f art does happen in Pregnant Woman, it is because Mueck has presented the physical reality of pregnancy, the astounding and mysterious fact of what it means to have one’s body transformed in that way. This is something Western art has not wanted to do, has not allowed space for, in most of its history. I am glad that Pregnant Woman exists.”

Tribute: Richard Serra (1938-2024)

Pansy Schulman | Architectural Record | 27th March 2024

Casual jobs at a steel works gave Serra “a certain respect for the potential of steel”. This respect later expressed itself in metres-high torqued sheets of rust-covered steel. These huge installations commanded attention, in part due to their size, but also some nervousness that the looming steel might fall over. Serra is considered to have redefined “the connection between viewer and artwork” The saga of his work Clara Clara, intended for Paris’s Tuileries Gardens, is recounted here.

Enter the void with Pierre Huyghe

Michael Prodger | Apollo | 1st May 2024

Huyghe is famous for exploring realities that “might have been”. In this Venice show, his sculptures and installations incorporate AI systems that go about the business of harvesting information and reacting to it. These “speculative fictions” of existence are “inert, funereal, [with a] slow moving beauty.” They are conceptually rich but not necessarily artistically rich. “There is the niggling sense of something so meaningful that it ends up carrying no sense at all.” Images are here.

60th Venice Biennale Review: Who Can Judge?

JJ Charlesworth | ArtReview | 19th April 2024

Each Venice Biennale opens to complaints; considered judgements are for later. This year’s show features artists who are often excluded: “artists of the Global South, the art of Indigenous people, the work of queer artists, of folk artists”. Puzzles the writer, how do we look at such diverse work and how should we value it? Shouldn’t a large show such as Venice be helping people to find “what they have in common”? Despite the inevitable rhetoric, it is “an oddly comfortable show”.

Caravaggio Made Darkness Visible

Ed Simon | Hyperallergic | 22nd April 2024

Caravaggio’s favourite compositional trick – portraying biblical characters as everyday Romans – mixed the sacred and the worldly. It reflected his philosophical vision that even the worst person had “sparks of divinity”. No one is perfect, nor purely evil. Caravaggio himself fits the bill. His behaviour, and many paintings of beheadings, suggest that “violence was his muse”. Yet he was also in thrall to human beauty. “Pain and pleasure mixed together, along with good and evil — the chiaroscuro of the soul.”

Art and Memory

Julian Barnes | London Review of Books | 9th May 2024

A must-read for anyone with an ‘all-time favourite’ artwork somewhere. Is the radiant image in your mind an accurate representation of that piece? For many of us, our recall is “not just the painting itself but its effect on us”. In the rapturous moment of seeing for the first time, do we enhance those parts of the picture of greatest appeal while editing out its imperfections? Oscar Wilde apparently said that only auctioneers can be impartial about art.

Willem de Kooning and Italy at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice

David Anfam | The Art Newspaper | 26th April 2024

de Kooning visited Rome in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Did this inspire in him a new way of looking? It’s the premise of a big show in Venice but the writer is unnconvinced. A group of landscapes are “stunners”, though more related to American highways than Italy. Further, works that show “extreme moods” are less reminiscent of classical Rome than “the Netherlandish Old Masters Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel with their images of torment [and] earthly delights.”

12th March 2024

Essay: Between machine and eye

Morgan Meis | The-Easel | 12th March 2024

Photography has, at times, struggled to be taken seriously as a form of high art. Point-and-click capabilities have democratised the medium – anyone can take a picture, right?  As if to make this image problem worse, the acclaimed Lee Friedlander says he doesn’t have any great ideas. Why then are his images utterly compelling?

Asking “exactly how much [an image] was an accident or not misses the point. Friedlander knows how to look when something interesting is happening. He trusts himself to point the camera and click. Why is he so much better at doing this than most of us? It’s impossible to say. The genius of Friedlander’s photography is to let the camera have its own ideas.”

The meteoric rise of Angelica Kauffman RA

Jenny Uglow | RA Magazine | 2nd January 2024

Arriving in London in 1766, Kauffman quickly became famous; ambitious, skilled at using “women’s power” while remaining “brilliantly unthreatening”. Such was her eminence that she was one of just two female founders of the Royal Academy. Admirable, but what about her art? It noticeably gets little coverage in a number of reviews, and one critic explains why. “[Her style] was theatricality … her figures pose with all the subtlety of street signs. [Her art] is frictionlessly fashionable”.

How Peter Blake makes his sculptures Pop

Kirsten Tambling | Apollo | 5th March 2024

Years before Warhol, Pop had emerged (in name and form) in Britain. Blake was an early figure, notable for his record album sleeves and his sculpture. He “slyly” juxtaposes high and low culture – Beethoven standing next to Elvis, or Hogarth prints next to comics. These works don’t cluster around a single narrative but rather “a proliferation of speculative anecdotes [such as] where are the Disney princesses going?” His work may not be heavily intellectual but is “as delightful as an anecdote can be.”

Resident Aliens: A Brief History of Videogames and Fine Art

Tiffany Funk | ArtReview | 11th March 2024

Videogame art is emerging! The convergence of art and video is evidenced by the video works of Bill Viola and by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum having held a videogame retrospective. This writer certainly hopes for such a convergence because it will help dilute the rampant exclusivity of the art world. She then backs off that utopian thought. Still, this piece usefully surveys a rich online world, some annoying jargon notwithstanding.

A Hidden History of Europe’s Pre-Modernist Women Artists

Barry Schwabsky | The Nation | 28th February 2024

Linda Nochlin’s famous 1971 essay queried the absence of great female artists. Since then, art history has re-discovered many of them and, in some cases, greatly elevated their status. Artemisia Gentileschi is but one example. A survey of female artists reveals plenty of “genteel amateurism”, which only speaks to the many women who, feeling thwarted, pursued various “sub-artistic” crafts. This show also reveals that whether an artist chose painting or craft, talent has a way of showing through.

Stranger than fiction: Discover five striking photographs by Jeff Wall

Matthieu Jacquet | Art Basel | 21st February 2024

Wall loves a puzzle. Exploiting the documentary-like quality of photography, he creates images of sometimes elaborately staged scenes. His approach repudiates photography’s origins as a recorder of events, instead placing the medium closer to cinematography. The payoff is that his photography gains a freedom that art forms like painting take for granted. Wall can blend memory and imagination as he wishes, creating not a fact but “a resemblance to a feeling about a fact”.

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