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Posted by cypher on April 29, 2007, 7:01 pm
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For much of my early career I was criticized by those in the art
establishment for painting in an adolescent manner. This was true in
fact and well as in style and subject matter. But that is not to say
that my 'adolescent' approach to art making was unique. The early
1980's had seen a tidal wave of crude, ugly and incompetent paintings
and sculptures land on the shores of New York galleries. At first such
work was called 'Bad Painting' and finally was called 'Neo-
Expressionism'. Neo-Expressionist paintings were typically rough,
violent works that belied their link to the easel painting tradition.
However the painters themselves looked back to early German
Expressionist like Kirchner and Nolde and the late paintings of
Picasso and Philip Guston. A typical Neo-Expressionist painting was
recognizably figurative but painted broadly in the manner of an
abstract expressionist buck and slosh canvas, it was large, garishly
coloured, crudely drawn, hastily painted and collaged with other
totemic elements. The subject matter of much of this work was sexual
or aggressive rage - however it was very rarely overtly pornographic -
these were very commercially minded artists after all. Their emergence
revitalized an art world recovering from the recessions of the 1970's
and arts retreat into the uncommercial dead ends of conceptualism and
Minimalism. Unexpectedly Neo-Expressionist artists reaped the rewards
of the brash optimism of the early 1980's, the Bull Market, and the
return of collectors to galleries. Hyped and promoted by a handful of
very ambitious and aggressive dealers in New York, Cologne, London and
Zurich, young painters like Schnabel, Basquait, and Clemente became
millionaires over night. Artists were constantly featured in fashion
magazines, written about in the social and personal columns, and shown
in retrospectives world wide.
The fathers of the Neo-Expressionist movement like Baselitz, Polke,
Clemente and Kiefer had been painting in the wilderness of the outer
art world during the late 1970's. However most of their follower's
where young male painters in their twenties. They were poorly trained
in representational painting, they hated formalist painters like
Noland and Oliski and were equally sick of the conceptual object -
their work was a rebellion against the final conclusions of the
Modernist epoch - the typed out artist statement and the all white
canvas. Few Neo-Expressionists were trained as figurative painters and
so their drawing style owed more to comic book illustration and
fashion drawing than to life-drawing. Their paintings were brash,
cynical, fastly painted and a miss-match of figurative motifs treated
in an abstract all-over manner. In short they were thoroughly
adolescent - and guess what? They were the single biggest influence on
my art from 1990-1998! Their training in art was the product of a
liberal arts policy in the west which bad seen the abandonment of slow
drilling in representational skills like; drawing from dirty and
graffitied plaster casts in the college canteen, recording the fatigue
and boredom of a life model in the stuffy and smelly life-room,
studying the anatomy of the figure in books and in models, analyzing
the cast of shadows, the mixing and blending of half and quarter tones
in a head study, or the painting of street scenes en plein air. In
fact very little of what they drew or painted could have said to be
part of the great tradition of realist painting in the west from the
fresco's of Greece to the Blue Period beggars of Picasso.
My own conversion to Neo-Expressionism came in a suitably poetic way.
On 19th October 1990, I had my wisdom teeth removed in St. Michael's
private hospital in Dun Laoghaire, and I had to stay overnight after
the operation. My mother brought me in magazines on Titian and
Mantegna. She also brought me in an art book she had bought in
Waterstones for me to read. I was skeptical at first of my mum's
present - she rarely knew what art books I liked or needed - but this
time she was spot on! The book was The New Image by Tony Godfrey. The
New Image focused on Neo-Expressionists of the early 1980's like (in
order of my preference at the time); Georg Baselitz, Julian Schnabel,
Anslem Kiefer, Francesco Clemente, Eric Fischl, Jiri Georg Dokoupil,
Albert Oehlen, Arnulf Rainer, Werner Buttner, Enzo Cucchi, Sigmar
Polke, Walter Dahn, Martin Disler, Markus Lupertz, Sandro Chia, Mimmo
Paladino, Therese Oulton, Gillian Ayres, Rainer Fetting, Salome,
Helmut Middendorf, Christopher Le Brun, Susan Rothenberg, A. R. Penck,
Robert Longo, Jorg Immendorff, Kenny Scharf and Kieth Haring. The New
Image also highlighted older artists of influence like (in order again
of my preference at the time); Robert Raucherberg, Brice Marden,
Joseph Beuys, Cy Twombly, and Philip Guston. A few weeks later I
bought a second hand copy of Art Expo 1988 - which had an article on
Julian Schnabel illustrated by five of his paintings. Other artists
included in the book were; Francesco Clemente, Martin Disler and Mimmo
Paladino.
My passion for the Neo-Expressionists was the passion of a young
artist ready to be swayed by a contemporary art movement. It was a
passion I could never repeat again (the closest I came was with yBa's
like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin). No matter how cynical and critical
you get - you still can still affectionately over look the many flaws
of an old love and that is how I feel today about my early love for
the 'Bad Painters'. As a fiery youth I saw Neo-Expressionist artists
like Schnabel, Bastelitz and Basquiat to be liberators from the
stultifying straight-jacket of traditional representational art which
I had struggled with for nine years. For years I had felt that my
greatest gift as an artist was not my traditional skills, nor my
intellect, but my over whelming need to create and express myself -
this was the one weapon the Neo-Expressionist artist needed in spades!
Adopting an almost automatic approach to painting, I often used what
ever colours came to hand, I let the foreground and background clash,
I scrubbed and jabbed and punched the paint brush at the canvas and
paired colours I knew would viciously jar with each other. I painted
faster and faster and often worse and worse. I presumed that the
incompetence of the work technically would add to it emotionally -
sometimes I was to be proved right - but most of the time I was proved
wrong.
For me Neo-Expressionism fitted all my own current prejudices -
towards early Modernism but without its Utopian view of itself as an
end to history. I responded immediately to the irony, sarcasm and
fecklessness of Neo-Expressionists like; Martin Kippenberger, Walter
Dahn, Jiri Georg Dokoupil, Albert Ohelen and Georg Baselitz. I too
shared their cynicism, lack of faith in historical progress and
willful inclusion of all the elements of artistic creativity that had
become taboo since 1955, (after the conceptual asceticism of Duchamp,
Johns, Warhol, Kosuth, and Judd). For me Neo-expressionism brought
back both materiality (in the philosophical sense of embodiment and
being) and material (in the form of broken plates, antlers, straw,
lead, or just simply thick unruly oil paint), to painting. It also
brought poetry (especially in the works of Cy Twombly, Francesco
Clemente and Enzo Cucchi), and narrative (for the first time since
Beckman) into paintings by artists like Paula Rego and Eric Fishel.
Raw aggressive emotion was also returned to art for the first time
since the last gasps of the French Tashists, American Abstract
Expressionists and European Cobra painters in late 1950's. However,
most importantly of all it brought about a return to paint, especially
oil paint, (that most conservative and ancient of mediums). Hilton
Kramer summed up the change it taste that brought about the Neo-
expressionist revival when he wrote; "Taste somehow seems to obey the
laws of compensation, so that with the negation of certain qualities
of a period one almost automatically prepares the ground for its
triumphal return at a later stage, but it is never possible to predict
exactly the schedule of taste. Its roots are in a deeper and more
mysterious layer than mere fashion. I believe that what is at the core
of every genuine change in taste is a biting sensation of loss , an
existential pain- a feeling that something absolutely vital for the
life of art has entered into a state of atrophy. And, at the deepest
level, taste aims to produce an immediate remedy for this perceived
lack." (P.173, Contemporary Art, Klaus Honnef, Taschen 1988) .
With the words of Kramer ringing in our ears it might at this point,
be worth taking up in detail some of the real concerns many critics
had with Neo-Expressionism. For while it proved to be immensely
popular with the general public, collectors and dealers - Neo-
Expressionism had many virulent critics, especially among conservative
critics obsessed with craft like Robert Hughes, conceptual artists
concerned with theory like Donald Judd, and formalist critics
concerned with the Modernist tradition like Clement Greenburg. Critics
quoted Post-Structuralist and Lacanian theory which proved that there
could never be an unmediated form of expression made outside of the
structures of social tradition. They called the Neo-Expressionists
cynical opportunists, acting out a form of diminished German
Expressionism alla 1910. After a decade of attending endless student
exhibitions many critics were suspicious of the type of art student
who in the 1980's jumped on the Neo-Expressionist band wagon relying
on ugliness and vehemence to hide a lack of formal intelligence or
manifest craft. To these critics the childish spasms of paint that
were summoned up in Neo-Expressionist paintings was only an attempt
conceal a lack of genuine avant-guard progression. To older critics
accustomed to dealing with the mature refined painterly grammar of a
Cezanne, Matisse or Beckman the anarchism of the Neo-Expressionist was
barbaric. They considered that slapping paint on (ironically) in
incoherent spasms could never lead to a new painterly grammar that
others could build on. Social critics attacked the commercial avarice
of the Neo-Expressionists and their shameless lust for fame. In many
respects the critics of Neo-Expressionism were right. The vast
majority of Neo-Expressionists were sloppy adolescent painters,
incompetent draughtsmen and cynical pastisher's.
Looking back now, I sometimes feel embarrassed by my uncritical love
of the Neo-Expressionists. At first I even liked Heftige Malerei
(violent painting) painters like Rainer Fetting, Salome and Helmut
Middendorf. But I quickly realised that their paintings were just
shallow, chic, wall paper - not the deeply felt expressions of pain
and passion I had hoped for. What attracted me to the Neo-
Expressionists was their adolescent attack on all the cold cerebral
certainties of late Modernist art. They were figurative painters, they
were cynical painters, they were vulgar painters, in fact they were
rock and roll painters. As a young painter myself, I was attracted to
all the hot and heavy drama of their vast canvases and their rejection
of painterly skill. As a youth, I too was wary of craft in painting. I
too, thought that content, emotion and the personal expression of the
artist was more important. It was only in my late twenties that craft
became more important to me and I was able too look back at most Neo-
Expressionist art and see it for the woefully incompetent and ugly
work it really was. But my attraction to the Neo-Expressionist
movement was not unique to me. A whole series of Irish (mostly male)
painters like; Michael Kane, Patrick Graham, Brian Maguire, Mick
Mulcahay and Michael Cullen plumbed the same depths a decade before
me.
However the crucial problem with this art was its lack of authenticity
(for a style predicated on the principal of expressivity) it was a
case of millionaire ham actors rather than really tortured souls like
Van Gogh, Artaud, Wols or Pollock - making overblown and overwrought
work. Very little of this Expressionism was anything other than a
youthful act of rebellion. Real Expressionist artists like those I
have previously mentioned, suffered poverty, madness, isolation, and
rejection not for a few years - but for decades. Thus their art (born
out of compulsion to create not a vanity to show and a greed to sell)
bore the ugly traces of real tortured expression. Most of the Neo-
Expressionist were nothing more than cynical opportunists - hoping to
cash in. If you ever get a chance, I would advise you to get a few
catalogs from the Graduate shows at your local art college. What you
will see is how astonishingly fast styles come and go and how utterly
ruthless young artists are in robbing blind the style and mannerisms
of artists considered famous, important and rich in the contemporary
art world. Well I have a few from The National College Of Art And
Design in Dublin in front of me. What I find hilarious is how the
guides from the 1980's are full of childish, crudely drawn, charcoal
drawings and murky paintings of skulls typical of every other crass
art student in the western world in the 1980's and then in the 1990's
all of a sudden the catalogs are full of Kodachrome photographs, and
rubbish tip installations - again just like very other unformed
student around the world. How is it possible for the cerebral nature
of the young population to switch from slathering painted rage to
intellectual nick-knckery in less than ten years? The answer is of
course - fashion. Most Neo-Expressionists were no more tortured and
intense than your local florist, and most Neo-Conceptualist in the
1990's were no more intelligent than your local postman. But
personally I was to find great rewards in a passionate study of
Schnabel, Basquiat, Baselitz, Salle, Polke, Richter, and Kiefer.
Suddenly with the Neo-Expressionist influence guiding me, I opened my
emotional flood gates, and became a more expressive and immediate
painter. I moved from a rather repressed kind of painting, into a more
open, aggressive, honest and emotionally rich brand of painting.
You Can Check Out My Version of Neo-Expressionism at www.thepanicartist.com
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