In Praise of Seriousness
By Matthew Collings & Emma Biggs, 2005
 |  | |
Tate Modern has a lot of good art in it, but it seems as if it’s by accident – Bonnard, say, or Donald Judd or whatever. The general vibe of the place is towards supporting inane trivial stuff – you know the ones. The museum is a big success in terms of getting the crowds in, but frankly 21 million people can be wrong. The enormous crowds arrive blank and they go away ill. They’re given a lot of empty spectacle. It doesn’t matter to the spectacle if some of its content actually has its own strong content and some is feeble and daft and entirely reliant on the mesmerizing silly contentless power of the spectacle. | | |
| Look at this painting by us. It only has values. No ideas -- we’ve completely ruled them out. At least, we only have visual ones. We feel the other kind is hopeless now, because corrupted. The whole idea of ideas in art is useless. Only have ideas about form. This will help you -- believe us. There isn’t any real connection between contemporary art and the past. Contemporary art is mostly amusing institutionalised insincerity, whereas the tradition of painting that includes, say, Impressionism, is about a kind of blazing candour: that is, you can do a bit of work to educate your eyes, and from that point you will be able to see the content of this type of art just by looking. What makes contemporary art a sillier affair is its non-lookability, its dependence on airy contents. They can be endlessly spouted. You often can’t really get the object to measure up to what is spouted about it. It is obvious a Rebecca Horn is a silly bit of trivial sentimental surrealism, not anything profound. (We only mention her now because she’s German, and maybe we won’t ever bump into her.) Actually Philip Guston is overrated too (Collings says: Biggs is still taken in by the schmaltz). In any case Guston is only mentioned here because he is such a sacred cow for contemporary-art-style painting. For all its air of high intellectualism contemporary art is really a branch of the mass media. Older art can be understood within a mass media context, but it is essentially different. Whereas contemporary art, which is often explained as critical of the mass media, is really continuous with it – it’s about thrills and spills, chatting-up a storm, creating a silly buzz. Trivia has a place in existence of course, but we shouldn’t want art to be trivial. (That’s exactly what we ask for when we ask everyone to clap at Tate Modern’s huge attendance figures.) Contemporary art of course includes many gestures towards seriousness, and we always try and salute them when we see them. But we are painfully aware that these are not what the big audiences are interested in, and they’re not what the culture of contemporary art – biennales, art magazines, art chat, Tate Modern, Saatchi, the Turner Prize, dire sonorous emptiness on The Culture Show and Late Review etc, artists everywhere explaining their moronic ideas and fake concerns – is fascinated by. Seriousness isn’t asked for. We say we want this to change, even if it means a fall in attendance figures. In the short term there is a price to pay for going against the mainstream. If you’re original, if you put things in an original way, for example, you can easily find that rather than being rewarded you will be slightly shunned -- someone else coming along and sentimentalising your original stuff will be rewarded and praised. The answer isn’t to change your approach but to accept that success in your aims might be slow coming. Contemporary art culture is all about shunning anything difficult or slow. It shuns anything that is anti-sentimentalism on the one hand and anti-pseudery and pomposity on the other. Seriousness is naturally anti-contemporary art culture. If you decide to be serious you will have to accept that you’re going to be slung a lot of patronising offensive bullshit by people in positions of power who don’t want to hear that maybe their power is bogus. |  Emma Biggs and Matthew Collings (2005) | |
Being Hopeful
So despite a conservative political climate that has left many longtime progressive activists depressed and demoralized, Zinn's reading of history keeps him optimistic about America's future. "I am hopeful," he says. "But hope rests on doing something. If you're not doing anything to change things, you have no right to be hopeful."
Hans Koning (Koningsberger), born Amsterdam 12 July 1921; died Easton, Conn., 13 April 2007
Hans Koning, who has died of cancer at the age of 85, was a prolific and politically committed writer and journalist, the author of over forty works of fiction and reportage. His radicalism may have eventually distanced him from the corporate publishing establishment in the US, where he settled after 1951, but he was widely published in the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, where his perceptive and often argumentative journalism won many admirers.
Born in Amsterdam on 12 July 1921, Hans Koningsberger (he changed his name in 1970) was the grandson of the noted Dutch poet Abraham van Collem and was raised in financially straitened circumstances by his unorthodox mother (who, one contemporary recalls, would take him to an upmarket restaurant and treat him to the best meal available, without any means of paying). He was educated at the University of Amsterdam before pursuing further studies in Zurich and Paris.
Koning experienced at first hand the horrors of Nazism when Holland was occupied from 1940, and he joined the Dutch Resistance, managing to escape to England, where he became one of the youngest sergeants in the British Army, serving in a tank division and working as a military interpreter during the Allied occupation of Germany. He later recalled that his wartime exposure to Nazi brutality had taught him ‘about how the darkness of towns felt in the Middle Ages… how people used to live “one day at a time,” how cold it really is in winter.”
After working as editor of the weekly Groene Amsterdammer, Koning accepted an invitation in 1950 to run a cultural programme on Radio Jakarta, and in 1951 he arrived in the US on a freighter from Indonesia. By now an experienced journalist, he began to concentrate on his fiction, and in 1958 The Affair was published to acclaim by Alfred Knopf. A series of novels followed, written in a characteristically terse and lucid style, dealing with failed love, political intrigue and the clash of ideologies. At the same time, in order to make a precarious living, Koning turned his hand to all manner of other writing—from studies of the Dutch Masters to children’s literature.
From the 1960s Koning began to specialise in the political travelogue, travelling widely in the Soviet Union, China, Latin America and Europe. His European cultural and linguistic background gave his writing on events in 1968 France and his native Holland a particular sort of insight lacking among many American contemporaries. Nor, despite his avowedly socialist sympathies, was he a blinkered fellow traveller; his Along the Roads of the New Russia (1968) is a considered critique of Stalinism and its legacy, while Love and Hate in China (1966), one of the first accounts of the Cultural Revolution era by a Westerner (Koning had to wait four years for a visa), is a sober and sometimes witty assessment of everyday life under Mao.
Koning’s political activism intensified with the Vietnam War, and he abandoned fiction in favour of what he called ‘committed literature’, helping to form the influential anti-war Resist organisation with others such as Noam Chomsky. When the war ended in 1975, he moved to London with his family in ‘self-imposed exile’, only to return to the US in 1988 (in 1978 he was naturalised as an American citizen).
His long-awaited bestseller had finally arrived in 1976 in the unlikely form of Columbus: His Enterprise, a highly polemical biography of the Genoese adventurer which countered the prevailing orthodoxy of heroic discovery in favour of a dark story of exploitation and fanaticism. Published by the radical New York Monthly Review Press, the book both enraged traditionalists and attracted a politically conscious generation of ‘Third World’ activists. When the Columbus quincentenary came around in 1992, the book sold even better, fuelling debate on the real significance of the Columbian legacy. A follow-up, The Conquest of America (1993), was also a success, but could not match the iconic status of the biography.
Koning was disappointed that his fiction attracted less attention than his other writing, but four of his novels were made into films. A Walk with Love and Death, a tale of medieval plague and passion, was directed in 1969 by John Huston and was the 15-year-old Angelica Huston’s debut, while the study of an alienated anarchist, The Revolutionary (1970), starred Jon Voight. Death of a Schoolboy (1990) was adapted by the BBC, and The Petersburg-Cannes Express (2003) was filmed in Moscow. None of these, to Koning’s chagrin, gathered critical plaudits and all were more a source of trouble than pride for the novelist.
Koning could be a difficult character, as a long list of editorial and political contretemps attests, but he was also an intensely loyal friend and loving husband and father. His commitment to his own form of socialism, born out of personal experience and strengthened by the Cold War, never wavered (‘I drank in socialism, along with my mother’s milk,’ he remarked), but was tempered by a genuine belief that the American people—if not their political leaders—could be a force for good in the world. This sense of optimism, together with a genuinely internationalist and cultured outlook, ran through his long and varied career.
Koning is survived by his wife Kate and their children Christina and Andrew and by two children from former marriages.
James Ferguson
Phillip Allen in his studio
It is Sunday morning, and Phillip Allen is in his studio making coffee and preparing for the day ahead. His studio in Hackney Wick is both a health hazard and a place of inspiration – traces of past work line the walls –the coffee machine is paint-splattered, as is the chair.
With solo shows at Milton Keynes Gallery, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Centre in
Born in 1967, he studied at
Coming home from his 9-5 job after finishing his degree, he would sit down and spend two or three hours drawing objects onto newsprint in pastels. He practiced this for five years. “I knew if I just kept at it, some idea of subject would become apparent”, he says.
This belief in the redeeming factor of hard work is an inspiring point of view in a culture where we are expected to be aware of our potential and future work before we even start. Although beautiful drawings, there is no hint in them of the painting that Allen would eventually be making.
He decided to realize these drawings sculpturally as a way of moving forward, but couldn’t stomach the actual logistics of making the pieces. “You have to be the kind of artist who doesn’t mind spending two hours a day on the phone”, he says, referring to the practicalities of organising materials to be made by workshops for use in the work. “There were too many other people involved”. And sculpture wasn’t right either.
“It seemed to always be about the end, the solution to the problem. The sculptures were answers, and what one needs are routes into further questions – the pieces didn’t open any doors to further work for me”.
There is an electronic chess board on his palette table – also covered in paint-ey fingerprints. “Painting is a lot like chess” he says: “One thinks one has to invent moves to be good at it, but what you’re really doing is learning a strategy, sets of moves that have been in place since the game began. So in the end winning isn’t about making grandiose gestures.. the further you get with the game the more you realize that it’s the small, subtle moves that are the most important.- the ones that may have the most profound effect. With painting I had to shift my perspective. 10 years ago I had my hands in everything: sculpture, painting – I was trying it all. Consumer culture and the current art culture makes one think one has to be constantly shifting. But it seems to be (like chess) ultimately about staying the game – carrying on”.
Phillip Allen is not trying to be more than he is – not trying to make the “grandiose gesture”, although he may end up making one by default. For him painting is one of many answers to the questions “What will you do with your time on earth? How do you want to spend your days?”
One could do a lot worse than spending the day in the company of his work. Or him, for that matter.
Interview for Total:Spec Magazine, 2007
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
