THE Turner Prize Exhibition may not be much of an event in terms of sheer quality these days, but after all, that is not the nature of the animal. Like its fellow in arms, the Booker, it is largely a creation of publicity and (usually drummed up) controversy: in other words, a triumph of able public relations and the ability to fasten upon new, upwardly mobile but rarely major talent. Nicholas Serota, the present director of the Tate Gallery, has never been backward in that field, a very important one for curators and gallery directors of today.
The winner is stale news by now the favourite was Gary Hume, but he was passed at the post by a Scottish video artist, Douglas Gordon. The field was quite small this year - a mere four entrants, or nominees of whom the other two were Craigie Horsfield, a respected photographer, and Simon Patterson, an installation/conceptual artist. Hume is the only painter included, though he has been other things as well, as is often the way nowadays. His paintings are done on a metal base (aluminium, I think) and are frankly decorative, in a sophisticated, hedonistic way.
Horsfield, who would have been my choice for the winner has been seen in Dublin and is familiar territory by this stage. His work lends itself to a large scale, which photographs do not always do, and most of the subject matter this time comes from a visit to Barcelona. His style is very black and white, slightly bleak, but strong and without technical gimmicks or gamesmanship, and he has an innate feeling for people as well as for places particularly cities. Simon Patterson spreads himself over a large space, with a big eye catching wall drawing and a fleet of miniature "yachts".
To be honest, I thought the winner almost the least talented of the four, but that was not the general feeling and in fact he has been a popular choice. Video is potentially a splendid, flexible medium, so why then do so many "art" videos end up looking rather like home movies? Gordon uses the inevitable repetitive, "hypnotic effects which stale very rapidly, while the faces mouthing or grimacing from large screens are pretty much what any amateur actor would do rather better. The best thing in his winning entry was the range of technical effects, though he had relatively little to say with them in the end.
Runs until January 12th.
THE Giacometti exhibition in the Royal Academy has been running for some until the now and goes on New Year. Am I right in sensing a coolness and indifference, even a touch of boredom, in many of the critiques so far? Giacometti has had so long a run in public favour his work has been seen so often and eulogised so much, that a reaction was probably inevitable; many people tell you now that they find "those spindly figures" repetitive, his style over mannered and almost one track. There has also been a certain shift of interest from the sculptures to the paintings, which for a long time - too long a time, in fact - were relegated to a secondary place in his overall output.
Unlike other Giacometti exhibitions, this one does not overload itself and, there is a minimum of repetition (in any case, the amount of repetition in his late work is surely a matter of professional industry and steady output not of failing inspiration). Alberto was born with art in his veins the eldest son of a respected ItalianSwiss Post Impressionist painter and another eminent Swiss artist Cuno Amiet, was his godfather (the great Ferdinand Hodler stood as godfather to his youngest brother, Bruno). For most of his career he moved from painting to sculpture and back with equanimity, though he was extraordinarily lucky in having in his brother Diego a very gifted craftsman who did most of his technical chores for him.
A series of hearty busts of his father show Giacometti striving for simplicity and a certain primitive quality, particularly in the planes of the face. When he went to Paris, in the 1920s, most of the great discoveries and innovations had been already made and though the works of this period are remarkable in themselves, they take obvious hints from Lipschitz, Laurens and even Picasso - not to mention, almost inevitably, African carvings. Giacometti also quite often coasted close to abstract art, though he never accepted that this was so - the heavy, plaque like bronzes of the late 1920s are in fact his radical simplification if human heads.
The Surrealist phase of a few years later brought such familiar masterpieces as the macabre, insectoid Woman with her Throat Cut. A period of wartime exile in his native Switzerland was followed by his return to Paris and the foundation of "Giacometti style" with spindly, elongated figures which resemble armatures without the clay, sometimes in movement and sometimes rigid. The heads are sometimes pin like, sometimes in hatchet like profiles, yet with uncannily exact features. The Chariot of 1950 is an unquestioned masterpiece, and the Figure in a Box Between Two Houses shows that he anticipated many of the preoccupations of "installation and environmental art. Over and over he used the same models for his figures and heads and busts - his brother Diego, his wife Annette, who had to pose long hours in the cramped, dusty, semi subterranean Paris studio.
Because of his friendly closeness to Sartre and other intellectuals of postwar Paris (including Beckett, who was a friend) Giacometti became identified with Existentialism and the once fashionable Temple of Despair, but this is a hallow, dated view. He always insisted that his so called stylisations or distortions were really visual discoveries attempts to nail down what he actually saw, and the outward skin of mannerism is quickly forgotten or slips away once you penetrate into the fact that his art is essentially perceptual, not conceptual. Both the paintings and the bronzes have an uncanny quality of presence, of being inexorably there before you, and they also give a unique sense of simultaneous expansion and contraction. This makes him, in particular, one of the century's relatively few great portraitists.
As for the drawings, surely nobody this century has drawn better, with the possible exception of Picasso. Born in 1901, Giacometti was second generation" School of Paris and came after the great pioneer of the Cubist and Fauve generations, but in sheer vision and originality he is not inferior to them.
Upstairs in the RA (you go up by lift) there is a richly varied show of drawings from the Thaw Collection at the Pierpoint Morgan Library in New York. It is called From Mantegna to Picasso and is fully as good as its name suggests. Goya stands out, but the 19th century section is especially rewarding with Degas, Millet, Delacroix, Ingres all outstanding. It is not enormous in scale, though the bonus is that you are not numbed by sheer quantity.
JACK B. Yeats exhibition's have become a regular, recurrent feature of the London art world as well as here, now that the English public has rediscovered him and can take him again on something like its own terms. The latest one, at the Waddington Galleries, spreads itself over much of Cork Street and even though many of the works on view are familiar, there is a sense of freshness and primal energy which is indomitable. Like his brother, but less self consciously, he grew more uninhibited, more joyful and celebratory as he aged, but there is also an abyss of questioning, and disquiet.
All the contrasting, but overlapping, periods of his very large output are well represented, with a high percentage of masterpieces from them all. Waterplay is a "middle period" painting (1924) of poignant charm, while Glory of 1946, dominated by the grease painted face of a circus clown, is as visionary as Rouault. There is also a goodly number of the watercolours and drawings included.
THE ICA Gallery on The Mall is due to expand soon, it seems, which is a good and even necessary idea as its present exhibition space is severely limited. The present exhibitor there is Vija Celmins, an artist of Latvian/Lithuanian origin who has made her home - and her mark - in the US.
It is rather a pity that what is on show dates almost entirely from the 1960s, but apparently her recent paintings have grown much bigger and the ICA could hardly have accommodated more than a few. The imagery is strangely mixed - some of the pictures" show simple, even banal domestic objects in near isolation, while others depict airplanes in flight, a starry sky etc. A starkly graphic quality is dominant throughout. The tones are greyish to the point of monotony, yet they are not while I would not go quite as far as some London critics, Vija Celmins is an original and arresting artist whom I would like to see more of (she would be an interesting choice for Dublin).
At Agnew's, John Wonnacott exhibits recent paintings in a realist mode, rather hard tonally in the Photorealist manner, although he does not fit into that movement. In fact, the realism is often contradicted by arbitrary perspectives and other pitfalls; the dominant effect nevertheless is of good and very capable academic painting in the traditional manner.
Wonnacott has painted more interestingly than this, in the recent past.
