Recently I visited the Capturing the moment exhibition at the Tate Modern, and to be honest it seemed wildly uncollected (and I’m usually a very appreciative viewer!)
Most descriptions are “the artist pushes boundaries”, “explores the material”. I think it’s already like white noise. Everyone’s, always, everywhere.
I wish I could read descriptions that are straight from the heart. “I paint it this way because I physically like to”. “I get stuck on buildings, so I shoot them”. Or as Katya Granova said once: the colours scream at me and I balance them out.
I want something alive. And some respect for boundaries! Why do you always fluff them up?
I’m sick of the curatorial white noise.
I read the criticism, and I’m fucking right!
“This show is far too rambling and chaotic”
“So the promised connection between photography and painting is there in one fundamental sense. Namely that Chen buys both”. (It turns out that it is the set of one private collector mostly)
“The wall texts are almost comically simplistic. ‘While photographers grapple with the mechanics of the camera, painters work with the surface of the canvas and the texture of paint.’ There is no thesis, no catalogue, no developed argument, barely a single striking idea on the subject of either painting or photography, let alone their relationship, even though this is art history 101”.
This is from The Guardian. Others are about the same.
But here’s the work that stole my heart, I turned to her and just stayed there. And I don’t care at all is it, as described — “whether it is reflected or two of them”, it is so NOT MATTER that it’s ridiculous. Is that really all there is to say about this work?
This is Gerhard Richter, here is his website. Exploring it now, he’s wonderful.
I also didn’t know the history of the work below at all — and it’s interesting. (It is incidentally one of the most expensive works sold in the artist’s lifetime, $90.3 million in 2018, awesome, well I had no idea, of course)
It tells us that he was first inspired by a random composition of two photographs as they formed on the floor of his studio (the best kind of work, as far as I can tell! let the photographs dance on their own) but Hockney destroyed the first version of the work. And then he filmed one part first in a villa in France, then filmed his then-partner in Kensington Gardens, and worked putting it all together. And that’s his former partner here, and yes, David Hockney is openly gay.
And the title of the work is Portrait of an Artist, yes. I like to think why it’s like that — and not read the criticism.
As the Guardian says again, well that’s how it would make sense to argue about painting and photography and their relationship.
(Photo below is from the Tate website, others are mine of course, just a phone notes)
