Exhibitions
Julian Schnabel (South London Gallery, 65 South Peckham Road)
Glitzy or generous?
Martin Gayford
Is it time to revive the 1980s? The mere question may make some of us — those of us, for example, for whom that decade seems like only the day before yesterday feel rather giddy, if not queasy. Further- more, you might wonder what there is to revive in all those striped shirts, paisley ties and post-modernist buildings, all slightly blurred pastiches of some other period, the Thirties or the Forties. How do you revive a revival? Nonetheless, there are signs that Just such a paradoxical resurrection may be on the way, one of them being the current exhibition of work by Julian Schnabel.
Artistically, the American painter Julian Schnabel stands for the Eighties more than any other artist. In an interview in the cur- rent Modem Painters with David Bowie, Schnabel protests against this association. He never, he insists, had anything personal- ly to do with Ronald Reagan or inflation. But it doesn't quite wash. Schnabel's career, rocketing to fame right at the end of the Seventies, like some dubious share issue (he was the Damien Hirst of those days), is emblematic of Eighties booster- ism. While the actual appearance of his work, its emphasis on chaotic mess, ran- dom recycling of bits of the past — includ- ing, famously, broken crockery — and lords-of-the-universe self-importance, seems in retrospect a perfect expression of the spirit of those times.
So what you think of Schnabel depends somewhat on what you think of the last decade, Robert Hughes has subjected achnabel to one of the most notable excori- ations in art critical history (to be found reprinted in Hughes's Nothing If Not Criti- cal). It is simply in literary terms a minor masterpiece. But then Hughes hated the Eighties. After the austerity of the Seven- ties, he wrote, there was a need for some- thing 'hot and heavy'. It was provided 'in abundance' by Schnabel's `Gaudi-derived plates and Beuys-derived antlers, his heavy surfaces of horse-hide and velvet choked with slimy pigment, and his incoherent lay- ering of "mythic" imagery . . Everyone wanted a genius, and in Schnabel our time of insecure self-congratulation and bulimic vulgarity got the genius it deserved.'
That's the case against. But, of course, there is room for two views about the Eighties. Hughes declared them an epoch of glut and glitz; Schnabel, talking to Bowie, remembers a 'generous' time. Cer- tainly, mores then were not so prissy and faux puritan as they have been of late. Also, there might be something to be said for being the perfect expression of an era, any era. So it was clever of the South Lon- don Gallery — which has won a reputation with exhibitions of young British artists to bring back Schnabel. Twenty years on is time to have another look at his work. What do we see?
There are two bodies of completely dif- ferent-looking work (Schnabel, like his con- temporaries Clinton and Blair, has never been nervous of abrupt U-turns). First, and chronologically earlier, there are three huge, really vast, sort of abstract paintings done for the Maison Cane, an intact Roman temple in Nimes. 'Huge' and 'vast' barely convey how big these pictures are, nor do the dimensions — 22ft-square. They aren't hung at the South London Gallery; they lean against the coving of the room, itself as high as two normal storeys. Few painters since the end of the Baroque era have worked on this scale — half a Tiepolo ceiling, say — although there are some comparable giant canvases in the atria of New York skyscrapers.
Big, of course, isn't necessarily beautiful, and, indeed, these aren't beautiful. They are brusque and rough, with awkward dark lines curving across them like contours on the weather map, crudely scrawled letters — AD for anno domini and various marks made by throwing paint-soaked tablecloths at the canvas. These three mammoth pieces have a degree of strength and presence. They are a continuation of the American tradition of abstract painting on a heroic scale which goes back to Pollock and Rothko. While nowhere near the class of those two mas- ters, they show Schnabel to have a freedom and confidence in flinging the paint about that is in the American grain.
The other, newer paintings could hardly be more dissimilar. Framed in a fake Old Master fashion, and slathered in extremely shiny varnish, they roughly resemble Velazquez portraits as reinterpreted by an incompetent 5th former. The only thing that makes them interesting is that all but one have been spattered with enormous blots of white paint. I suppose they may be making some cultural point (Schnabel told Bowie that he only made them so as to chuck the white on afterwards): they might be about the culture of the past being reduced to kitsch and randomly eaten away by emptiness. But that doesn't alter the fact that they are themselves highly kitsch, glitzy, post-modern and all those discred- itable Eighties things. But even the decade's defenders — and I have fond memories of it myself — never claimed that it was notable for good taste.
Ann° Domini' (left), 1990, and 'Untitled, 1990, by Julian Schnabel
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