Will Gompertz

I recently finished reading "What Are You Looking At?: 150 Years of Modern Art in the Blink of an Eye"" by Will Gompertz, the BBC's arts editor.

I bought it to fill the vacuum left by "The Story of Art" by E.H. Gombrich.  I'd bought a secondhand (cheap) version of that book, published in 1979, which meant that I was missing out on significant developments in the art world since that time.

Interesting that both authors' names start with "Gom" indicating a similar Germanic heritage (Gom meaning man, apparently).

Anyhow, the two books dovetail very nicely - not only because one starts where the other finishes (with a bit of overlap) but also because both authors write well, step through developments chronologically,  stick to analysing masterpieces in a down-to-earth way and avoid the pretentious twaddle used by a lot of art theorists.

By the way, Mary Loveday-Edwards, our Context of Practice lecturer, says I'm wrong to view all art theorists with disdain because some of them, such as Gombrich, don't write in riddles.  But I view Gombrich as an art historian rather than a theorist.   I think you have to have theories to be a theorist and I don't think art can be analysed in such a scientific way.

So, what about Will Gompertz's book?

I was attracted to it in the first place because I'd seen Gompertz on TV and was impressed with his high forehead (brains?).  I admired him for volunteering to do a stand-up comedy show about modern art at  the Edinburgh Fringe.  And the following lines in Amazon's book description looked promising:

Refreshing, irreverent and always straightforward, What Are You Looking At? cuts through the pretentious art speak and asks all the basic questions that you were too afraid to ask.  

Now I've checked out  his minimalist Wikipedia entry I'm also impressed that he didn't take any A-levels and makes a point of telling the world he didn't.

All of this positive stuff has to be set against his former job as "director of Tate Media" which I think means he was in charge of developing the Tate's Web presence.  In my view, this makes him very much one of Art's "in-crowd" - a negative.

I've already gone on about Gompertz's adulation of Marcel Duchamp in previous posts (see "Duchamp" and "Duchamp Take 2") but there's a couple of other things in his book that stick in my mind.

The first one is that he likens interpreting modern art to solving cryptic crosswords;  the more you already know about modern art the deeper you can get in understanding the artist's intentions and the more enjoyment you'll experience.

This is a précis of what Gompertz wrote, not what I think.  Personally,  I can't do cryptic crosswords and I can't be bothered to try and learn how.  And I'm not sure whether I buy the analogy anyhow.  With cryptic crosswords, there is only one right answer and you know when you've found it.  With a piece of modern art, you can speculate about what the artist was trying to communicate and you can examine your own response to it (if you have any).  This is not analogous to solving a crossword; it's just giving you some food for thought.

The other thing that sticks in my mind is Gompertz's analysis of Damien Hirst's work.  He says it's full of references to other artist's work - a veritable monster cryptic crossword (my words.)

I can't help wondering whether Gompertz is giving Hirst too much credit, whether he's reading stuff into his work that wasn't put there deliberately.  At the time it made me think of Life of Brian - a crowd following Brian and interpreting whatever he said as confirmation that he was the Messiah.

Brian: ...Will you please listen? I'm not the Messiah! Do you understand? Honestly! Woman: Only the true Messiah denies his divinity! Brian: What? Well, what sort of chance does that give me? All right, I am the Messiah! Crowd: He is! He is the Messiah! Brian: Now, fuck off![Silence] Arthur: How shall we fuck off, oh Lord? Brian: Oh, just go away! Leave me alone!

Maybe it doesn't matter?  Maybe the references reflect Hirst's subconscious and that's what Gompertz finds so enthralling?

Something like this happened to me on the "Making Waves" project in Plymouth.  My "Smitten" design, see below, was one of the winners in a competition to decorate some giant fibreglass sunfish forming a tourist trail.  The designs were supposed to have a reference to Plymouth in them, mine being a play on Smeaton's tower on the Hoe,  a symbol of the city.

 Long after I won the commission a fellow student remarked that it was in the style of Beryl Cook, who lived in Plymouth.   Another reference to the city!  From then on, of course, I was happy for people to assume it was deliberate.

Marcel Duchamp, Take 2

I've read a lot more of "What are you looking at" by Will Gompertz and come to the conclusion that Marcel Duchamp deserves a lot of the respect that's heaped upon him with regards to his role as the founding father of modern art.

By the same token, I've started to think that Julian Spalding must be the whacky one.  If you recall one of my earlier posts, Spalding took the view that Duchamp wasn't a particularly good artist and had managed to hoodwink people into believing he was important.

Now I've read that Duchamp was one of the key advisors of Peggy Guggenheim.  She bought a lot of art on his say-so, and it was Duchamp that gave her ideas for some of her exhibitions.

Tick tock tick tock

Actually, time has passed since I began this post and last night (May 26) I finished reading "What are you looking at" and my opinion of Gompertz has changed somewhat.   I've become a bit more sceptical.   He's clearly a huge fan of Duchamp and sees his influence in nearly every bit of modern art he looks at.

So I think I'll halt this post now and write a new one about Gompertz and his book.

Self-Evaluation

It's crunch time on this Context of Practice course.  I'm trying to complete a "student self-evaluation sheet", which I have to hand in by tomorrow, 15th May.

Overall, I think I ought to get a decent mark.  As is my wont, I've overdone most things - gone way over the top on writing blog posts, for instance.

However,  I'm finding it hard to evaluate my work against some of the learning outcomes on the form so I thought I'd use this space to chew things over.

Outcome 1

Identify and demonstrate an understanding of key ideas and theories that affect the practice, production and consumption of art, design and media 

 I don't understand some of the theories, mainly because they're produced by people using language designed to prevent me understanding.

I have made valiant efforts to overcome this - notably by reading "The Story of Art" by E.H. Gombrich from beginning to end, followed by "What are you looking at" by Will Gompertz,  which I'm half way through.

But I can't give myself top marks, can I?  So next category down:  70-79%

Outcome 2 

Begin to apply appropriate theoretical approaches to the study and interpretation of art, design and media

 This course has encouraged me to start researching artists, notably:

• Edmund de Waal  
• Antony Gormley  
• Richard Deacon 
• Anish Kapoor
• Alison Wilding
• Bill Woodrow
• Richard Wentworth
• Tony Cragg
• Grayson Perry
• Martin Creed
• Damien Hirst
• Marcel Duchamp

I've also checked out other aspects of the art world, such as Charles Saatchi's role in it,  whether  conceptual contemporary art is a con and other people's views on art theorists.

I wouldn't have done any of this if it wasn't for this course, so it is delivering benefits.  

However, I can't say I've used "appropriate theoretical approaches" in doing this.  I've just followed my nose.  So 70-79% again?

Outcome 3

Research, evaluate and contextualise their own area of practice informed by key ideas and theories.

Researching Antony Gormley and another artist, David Reekie, influenced my Faces project, currently being assessed for my Artist-Designer-Maker assignment. 

Similarly, reading about Michelangelo in "The Story of Art" led to the basis of the glass sculpture I've proposed for Derriford Hospital.  I've been shortlisted for that project.

Previously,  I made a glass sculpture to "echo" the "Signs and Wonders" installation of Edmund de Waal in the V&A

On the other hand, a lot of this isn't evident in the work I produce, and I've often struggled to see the relevance of topics we've covered in this course to my practice.

I'm not sure that I've addressed the outcome with these remarks.  So 70-79% again?

Outcome 4

Demonstrate a range of communication skills utilising academic conventions.

I'd rate my communications skills as follows:

• Written.  Excellent.  However, I abandoned using the Harvard referencing scheme in my blog and just used links (loads of them!) instead, so I fall down on "utilising academic conventions".
• Verbal.  OK.  I'm much better at writing because I'm not a fast thinker.  Composing text gives me more time and encourages me to analyse issues (this post being a good example of what I mean).  On the other hand, I think I come across as passionate and enthusiastic when I speak in public, which most people like.
• Visual.  The fact that I've won competitions for my designs for the Devonport Column Gate and a Sunfish in Plymouth's "Making Waves" project demonstrates my strengths in this area - not only in coming up with well-researched ideas but also in presenting them in a compelling way.   

In retrospect, I think the presentation that Helen and I did missed some interesting points on the issue of the value of art.  I suspect that it demonstrates that I'm not very good at teamwork.

So, 70-79% again?

Pompidou Centre

We visited the Pompidou Centre today.  A lot less crowded than the Musee D'Orsay, possibly because it was a normal work day in Paris and possibly because it cost 13 euros each, as opposed to free entry at Musee d'Orsay.

We only got around to looking at the art on floor 5, which dates from 1900 to 1970 - the era I'm reading about in Will Gompertz's "What are you looking at?"

In particular, I've just been reading about cubism and how Picasso and Braque worked alongside each other developing it.   The book analyses  Braque's "violin and palette" and says Picasso did something similar.

Picasso's version was there in the Pompidou Centre!  In fact there were quite a few Picassos and I couldn't find a single Braque, which was a bit odd.  I didn't look very hard so maybe there were some Braques hidden away, but if I had been the curator I would have put Braque's version near Picasso's to recognise their collaboration and encourage comparison.

Similarly, I couldn't find a Georges Seurat.  I really like his "A Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte".  And I've been reading about the colour theory pioneered by Seurat; putting dots of opposite colours next to each other to make the whole picture buzz with life.  I would have liked to examine that in more detail.

While at the Pompidou Centre I encountered a model of the "Monument to the Third International" by Vladimir Tatlin.  It's a sort of helter-skelter made out of wood that reminded me of the twisted wooden sculptures by Richard Deacon that Beryl and I looked at in London a couple of months ago.

When we were back in the hotel I picked up my Gompertz book and by pure coincidence the next thing I read was about Tatlin's tower - how it was meant to be a model for a huge structure, higher than the Eiffel Tower, to celebrate communism.  It never got built but Tatlin seems like my kind of guy - called himself a constructor rather than an artist.

Anyhow, it made me think - not so much about this particular exhibit but more about what's in places like the Pompidou Centre.  There's obviously a huge amount of history behind exhibits like Tatlin's tower - museums get a lot more interesting (and rewarding) when you know some of the background.

I've now gone on to read about the arrival of abstract art - Kandinsky's efforts to capture music in painting and Malevich's Black Square.  Getting tougher to understand!

Musee d'Orsay

We're in Paris.  Our original plan was to visit the Musee d'Orsay, the Pompidou Centre and the Louvre in addition to having some lovely grub and doing some shopping.

I can see us cutting back a bit on the arty stuff after our experience today.  We had to queue for almost two hours to get into the Musee d'Orsay by which time we were quite tired.   Then we were faced with my regular issue with art galleries  - so many people, so many pictures, so little time and tranquility to really study things.

 There was a lot to study.   For a kickoff, the museum has a special exhibition running at present entitled "Van Gogh/Artaud - The Man Suicided by Society."

Antonin Artaud, I discovered, was an artist who had similar "convulsive" mental issues to Van Gogh.  In 1946/7 Artaud was encouraged, initially against his will, to study Van Gogh and ended up taking the view that society had driven Van Gogh to suicide "by its indifference or in order to prevent him from uttering unspeakable truths."

Anyhow, all of this was of special interest to me because I'd been reading all about Van Gogh in Will Gompertz's "What are you looking at" book, in which he says, forcefully, that seeing a print of a Van Gogh is one thing and seeing the real thing is totally different - the only way you can really experience the energy transmitted by the painting.

So I couldn't really bottle out of queuing to see the exhibition and there was no entrance charge.

Did I experience the electricity buzzing in the genuine Van Goghs?  Not really.  I could see that they were painted in a very dramatic way but they didn't bowl me over.  Maybe they would have if I'd had some peace and quiet to study them?

The Musee d'Orsay is we'll known for its collection of Impressionist paintings, which I've also been reading about in Will Gompertz's book.  We whizzed through the large numbers of Renoirs, Monets, Manets, Degases, Cezannes and so on.   Should have spent more time on them but we were tired out!