ARTS
Don't be afraid of ridicule
There is now a well entrenched conven tion that anyone who dares to criticise, condemn or even question the meaning of the work of many contemporary sculptors and artists is automatically reviled and ridiculed. The contemporary art establish- ment of dealers, gallery directors, critics and collectors, as well as the artists em- selves, have an unshakable belief that heir value judgments should not be challeti ed.
The fear of ridicule was brought home to me only recently at the unveiling of Maggi Hambling's sadly inadequate memorial to Oscar Wilde near Trafalgar Square. Igever a sculptor missed the point of the htigely flamboyant personality she was portraying with her granite sarcophagus, this was a perfect example. In the crush of the couple of hundred people who were at the cere- mony, hosted by Sir Jeremy Isaacs, there were many disappointed faces and much furtive criticism. One very senior member of the academic world — not usually a per- son afraid to deliver robust opinions looked round very carefully before leaning close to my ear, agreeing with my reactions and venturing the thought that he was not at all surprised there had been difficulty raising the £175,000 needed to pay for it.
How wonderful it would be to be around in a hundred years time to see what poster- ity makes of the Britpack, Damien Hirst, Chris Ofili, Rachel Whiteread and so many others working in the late-20th century. I want to hear a new generation of art lovers shouting out without fear of ridicule that the emperor was not wearing wonderful new clothes. He really was naked. I have this fantasy about people such as the Tate's Nicholas Serota and the collector Charlo Saatchi going home after a hard day's watt keeping straight faces. They close their respective front doors and, after p wring large reviving drinks, collapse int heir favourite chairs giggling helplessly bout the endless joke they keep playin n gullible and credulous public.
Our arts schools are churning out gen eration of sculptors and artists whet- hav had virtually no training in drawing an sculpting from life. They are graduatin without even a basic understanding o anatomy, let alone how to model clay. On result, for example, was that only recent' Madame Tussaud's had to search as f afield as Azerbaijan to find students wit the basic skills who could fashion high- quality, life-like waxworks. No young artists here were capable of the work. It is depressing listening to someone such as Glynn Williams, professor of sculp- ture and head of the school of fine art at the Royal College of Art. He says that "less you make art colleges prisons, piti cannot make the training something that is not appropriate any more. He concedes that figuration is 'going through a bad patch' at the moment and makes the point that students are inter ted now in new pieces and innovative m rials, and adapt- ing materials in a prov tive way. It is a view highlighted by Ca y de Monchaux (who was short-listed for the last Turner Prize) who fashions pieces of pink suede to look like female genitalia. She said that she had had no inspiration from the work of the Old Masters and without a hint of a blush thought it would be pointless to d work like Michelangelo. Contempora artists are like social barometers, she fel whose work reflects the time they are in.
Fine, but when someone with the autho ity of Leonard McComb, former keeper the Royal Academy Schools, dismisse much contemporary work as being motivat- ed by the ad man's world, then the process of ridicule I have already outlined begins. McComb, who has stepped down as keeper to devote more time to his own 'work, is very much a modern artist whose work is esented , in the Tate Gallery and the Council collections. So when he had 'A strong, clean tasting lager — the ideal ccompaniment to a curry or a fight in the pub car park' the temerity to suggest that, while he did not mind whether art was figurative or abstract as long as the artist was a poet who could move people, the establishment was happy to let Cathy de Monchaux wade in. She managed to come up with the mature and considered view that his criticism was a reactionary, middle-aged male response to change. On another occasion, the Scottish sculptor Sandy Stoddart dared to criticise Antony Gormley's 'Angel of the North' on BBC Television. In a trice, Philomena Davidson Davis, a former president of the Royal Society of British Sculpture, fired off a press release from her Sculpture Compa- ny describing his 'lone voice' as 'outdated, outmoded and narrow'.
Many artists, and I suspect Ms de Mon- chaux and Ms Davidson Davis are among them, are their own worst enemies in that they share a remarkable arrogance about explaining their work. The most important question never to ask a conceptual artist or sculptor about their work is 'can you explain this to mer. So, of course, I ask it regularly. When Anish Kapoor won the Turner Prize several years ago, I recorded an interview for Radio Four. Having described what his work looked like, I asked him the dreaded question. 'It is not for me to tell anyone what it is about,' he said. 'It is for people to decide for them- selves what it is about.' He must have been reading about the French sculptor Jean Ipousteguy who has said rather alarmingly, `Sculpture is not made to function but to make us function.'
Early last year I was in Denmark to pre- view the work of Per Kirkeby before his exhibition, including his red brick wall, opened at the Tate Gallery in London. He struggled politely with the same question and came up with this winner: 'In my work, you experience a clear sense of space and at the same time you feel enclosed.' A Danish critic did even better. 'Much of Kirkeby's work is to do with the resolution of problems, even when the problem is not defined.'
However, the fightback from those want- ing a return to at least some compulsory traditional training in art schools seems to have begun. The immediate past president of the Royal Society of British Sculptors, John Mills, points out that the inability of so many art students to sculpt or draw from life is a recent phenomenon and no one is about to wipe out 4,000 years of history. A growing stream of students is visiting his studio to talk to him about figuration. More dramatically, the sculptor Tanya Russell is seeking premises in London to set up her own sculpture academy with a four-year course to counteract what she sees as the laissez-faire attitude of the main art schools.
The public are fighting back too. An obscure, £10,000 memorial to Princess Diana in Rugby has been pulled down because local people did not like it. And in Whitehaven in Cumbria, where the Spanish sculptor Eduardo Chillida had designed a controversial l8ft-high steel memorial at a potential cost of £300,000, locals said 'no' and the project was scrapped. As one Lon- don critic put it so exquisitely, talking about the elephant dung painting of the 1998 Turner Prize winner: 'I am so tired of seeing shit masquerading as art.'
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