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REVIEW

Gesamtkunstwerk: New Art from Germany
Saatchi Gallery, 18th Nov 2011 – 30th Apr 2012

Click here for the article in German (20.12.2011, Die Welt)

By Ben Lewis

As I walked round Charles Saatchi’s new survey of German art, I was filled with the same sense of inverse cultural nationalism, that I first felt 25 years ago, aged 17, in 1984, when I was blown away by the Max Beckmann exhibition at the Haus der Kunst. I wondered: why is German art so much better than ours?

Anti-nationalism aside, there are other good reasons why I left the Saatchi Gallery for once in a relatively positive mood. Saatchi has always been quite good at German art. He brought Anselm Kiefer to London in 1986 in a big show at Boundary Row, exhibiting him in a boldly contrasty two-person exhibition with American Minimalist Richard Serra. He was relatively fast on the uptake with Thomas Scheibitz and Frank Ackermann, showing them in his “Triumph of Painting” show in 2005, along with Martin Kippenberger and Jörg Immendorf. Now he’s filled his four-floored gallery with a good cross-section of the generation down from Scheibitz.

Also, this show has none of the made-for-Saatchi feel of his Middle Eastern exhibition, where there seemed to be an Arabian version of Sarah Lucas, called Shirin Fakhim, and the centrepiece, a huge room full of women in burkas made out of tin foil (“Ghost”, Kader Attia, 2007), was silly funfair art.  Nor do we have here the large numbers of effectively identical work in Saatchi’s Chinese show, like the ghastly rooms of Zhang Xiaogang and Feng Zengjie. German art, thanks to its long history, is better at resisting Saatchification than the art of other nations with younger contemporary art scenes.

The centrepiece of this exhibition is a superlative room of Isa Genzkens. Genzken’s feverish creativity has led to an uneven and over-large oeuvre, but Saatchi had only good pieces, here. There were some mirrors covered in shiny wrapping tape, and a handful of her totemic, strangely monumental sculptures with their plinths wrapped in tinsel and plastic flowers, topped with perspex chairs and toy models of monsters, cars and soldiers. Genzken, to my British eyes, feels firmly located in a Sigmar Polke lineage. There’s the same pop art collage aesthetic and a sense of impending consumerist armageddon, finished off with the fetishisation of the transient, but with a visual vocabulary that is updated for today’s society and made with objets trouvés, not paint. “Do we really produce so much crap?” her art asks rather simply. There’s the contradiction between her obsessive love of the cheap materials of the contemporary high street and her formal discipline. Therein is the visual tension with which she conveys the manic tension of consumer society.

Genzken is the Ausstellungsoma, aged 63, presiding over a brood of Enkelkinder who often, but not always, looked like her disciples. In other rooms are handfuls of lyrically-arranged junk and urban detritus from Thomas Helbig, Friedrich Kunath, Kirstine Roepstorff and Ida Ekblad. In common with these artists, Alexander Bircken’s vertical arrangements found materials and rubbish – like wire mesh, stones, blue plastic and painted apple cores -takes Genzken’s neurotic pop down a notch or two on the dial, with fewer elements in calmer arrangements.

But Genzken is not the whole story here. Other artists in this exhibition often seem to be evoking a modernism from the 1900s. In English we might call them Modernist fogeys. The Romanian twins Uwe and Gert Tobias, whose abstract woodcut prints, with the folkloric shapes, are so chromatically and texturally seductive, recall the woodcuts of Schmidt-Rottluff and geometric paintings of Kandinsky, reversioned within a graphic Street Art sense of design. Markus Selg travels via the wood carvings of Baselitz and Balkenhol into a wonderfully melancholic modernist-primitivism, which made me think he was the lovechild of Käthe Kollwitz and Otto Müller. Meanwhile, Georg Herold’s elegant but sexy reclining figures owe something to Modigliani in their elongations and geometry. A couple of artists combined Genzken and Retro-modernism. Max Frisinger echoed Fernand Léger’s ‘tubist’ paintings with a breathtaking three-dimensional construction inside a large glass vitrine out of furniture off-cuts and other bits and pieces.

Genzken is an ex-wife of Gerhard Richter, who currently has a huge retrospective at the Tate Modern, so Saatchi was rather cannily positing an alternative, both in aesthetic and youthfulness to Nicolas Serota, the Tate’s director, and an art mandarin with whom he has some rivalry. It worked quite well. In contrast to Richter’s neutral, cool, calculating abstract project, we had manic pop art and modernist requiems.

As a survey show, there are predictable shortcomings. It is full of the kind of thing you expect Charles Saatchi to buy. The work is bright, simple, large in scale, often cartoonish in its aesthetic and displays its heritage a bit too obviously. The most guilty of this latter crime is André Butzer whose thickly impastoed abstracts look to me like A.R. Penck with extra dribbles and a few Halloween masks. I couldn’t see much of a point in this sub-COBRA splattering, nor in much of the ponderous and gaudy paintings from Stefan Kürten, Jutta Koether or Ida Ekblad. Too much paint, too much detail, too much apocalypse. Only Andro Wekua, Georgian-born Berlin resident, who was in Venice this year, triumphed on two dimensions, with a huge image of a sunset, realised on 170 glazed ceramic tiles. The translucent colours of sky and clouds, and simple geometry of a long road receding into the distance, with a sun at the vanishing point, felt like a grand statement about the twentieth century history of central and Eastern Europe though I could be reading too much into it.

Then there were the gaps. We Brits are lucky that Saatchi has the time and money to give us such a large-scale show of young German art, but Charles only collects a certain kind of art. Where, I wondered was Hauser and Wirth’s upcoming Cuban-born Berlin artist David Zink-Ye, whose meticulous porcelain octopuses and metal palm trees create a new fantastical and tropical minimalism. And where was former Rosemarie Trockel student and beguiling-artist-in-her-own-right Thea Djordjadze. I had a sense that the Rosemarie-Trockelist direction in German art, with its aesthetic of rigorously pared-down objects was absent from Saatchi’s exhibition.

I suppose you are really wondering what does a British person make of German art today? There are some similar trends. We also have a lot of artists who work with junk, and a lot of artists who revisit modernism nostalgically. But we do it so differently. Our retro-modernism is ephemeral and decorative. We are likely to paint up a nice old wallpaper as a work, as Marc Camille Chaimowicz does, while you have Thomas Kiesewetter, among my favourites in this show, whose dramatic twisted metal sculptures compress Matisse, Picasso, David Smith and pop art car sculptor John Chamberlain and into welded works heavy with mourning and what we call ‘angst’. We’ve even taken your word! We Brits are predisposed to find in all German art a seriousness informed by the weight of your twentieth century history, but some of that clichéd image of German culture seems undeniable. Look at the different ways you and we do shiney: we have Damien Hirst’s shiney gold-plated cabinets full of industrial diamonds, you have Isa Genzken’s shiney assemblages of tinsel, mirror-tiling and gold tape. It’s the sleek versus the obsessive. It’s the difference between Oscar Wilde and Werner Herzog. We are lightweight, witty, diffident, detached. You are intellectual, searching, passionate. That’s why I think German art is so much better than ours.

By Ben Lewis

Click here for the article in German (11.12.2011, Welt am Sonntag)

Last week the art world experienced the equivalent of a suicide bombing campaign. Charles Saatchi, who runs his own magnificent contemporary art museum in London, wrote contemptuously about the lack of taste of today’s billionaire art collectors, while Adam Lindemann, one of the first US collectors of Murakami and Hirst, called for a boycott of the Miami art fair. As Oscar Wilde would have said, one disillusioned art collector’s assault on the art world might be considered a freak event, but two (in the space of a week) suggests a coordinated suicide bomber campaign.

Adam Lindemann

In the Guardian, on 2nd December, Charles Saatchi wrote with a vehemence, which stunned the art world, that “Being an art buyer these days is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar. It is the sport of the Eurotrashy, Hedge-fundy Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard.” Art now exercised a “mystical power …over the super-rich”, he complained as if he was the first to notice, because it makes them look “refined, tasteful and hip, surrounded by their achingly cool masterpieces.” Next came his recantation. Once he thought that any increase in interest in art was a good thing, but not any more! Saatchi concluded with that disarmingly bold self-deprecation that is such a British skill – “Even a self-serving narcissistic show-off like me finds this new art world too toe-curling for comfort.”

Charles Saatchi

If you know a little about the history of Charles Saatchi’s acquisitions and sales of works of art, you may detect a note of hypocrisy.  ‘Chequebook Charlie’ is known for spending vast sums on art himself. He has reportedly has been buying plenty of works from jpegs sent to him by email. He is known for buying work for knock-down prices, for which he bargains hard, then exhibiting the stuff in his gallery space, before finally selling it for a massive profit – Damien Hirst and Peter Doig being two of many artists whose work he has used in this way. But Saatchi tells us that there is a difference between himself and the rest of them. “These people” he suggests, “enjoy having easily recognised, big-brand name pictures, bought ostentatiously in auction rooms at eye-catching prices, to decorate their several homes.” While he, on the other hand, tells us that, “any profit I make selling art goes back into buying more art.” That is probably true, but it still doesn’t stop it being a way for him to increase his wealth and status, just like those he criticises.

Adam Lindemann is guilty of a variant of the same hypocritical denunciation as his British colleague, though his benefits from some self-aware irony. Lindemann is an intriguing figure in the contemporary art world, at once an insider and an outsider. He famously sold Jeff Koons heart for $23m at auction in 2007, only six months after he took possession of it for a price of only $3m, antagonising Koons’ dealer, the world’s most powerful gallerist, Larry Gagosian. Lindemann’s published an entertaining though anodyne book on collecting contemporary art a few years ago and he now writes a regular column for the American newspaper, The New York Observer, He writes well but he talks up artists and defends auction buddies in ways that reek of conflict of interest.

On November 29th, he declared in the New York Observer that “I’m not going to Art Basel Miami Beach this year. I’m through with it, basta.” and he called on everyone else to boycott it. “Why should I be seen rubbing elbows with all those phonies and scenesters, people who don’t even pretend they are remotely interested in art?” he asked. He amusingly listed all the billionaire’s parties and dinners he had been invited to which he wouldn’t be attending, and then went on to launch his own semi-serious anti-art-world campaign called “Occupy Art Basel Miami” Very droll.

Lindemann’s op-ed competed with Saatchi’s in the hypocrisy stakes. Ten years ago, he was himself one of the newbie collectors, prowling round art fairs with lots of money to spend on his new hobby, and enjoying all the art world parties he got invited to. His art-buying helped establish a new brash and glitzy aesthetic in art, as he bought work from Bling artist-businessmen like Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Anselm Reyle and Japanese manga pop artist Takashi Murakami. Does he think he made any mistakes himself? If only! Self-criticism is not yet on the agenda, but now Lindemann is himself complaining about the quality of the art. The art served up at art fairs, he said, is “merchandise, eye candy, commercial and just plain boring.” He harked back to an art fair golden age – just a few years ago, though! – when collectors went there to discover smaller galleries with unknown young artists. In fact I first met, filmed and interviewed Adam at the Armory Show art fair in New York in 2003, when he attempted to buy work by the now high-priced artist Wangechi Mutu. He left empty-handed – all the work had already been taken! Today Lindemann is jaded: “I’ve been to too many fairs, I’ve seen the same stuff over and over again for years. It has lost its lustre and much of its purpose, so why should I bother?” Even so, Lindemann did turn up for Miami, prompting a lot of gossip column stories. He said his protest had been an ironic one.

So what is the motivation for these two outbursts? One could view them cynically as the roars of two old lions past their prime. Every few years there is a Oedipal upheaval in the art world. A mature generation of art collectors complain that art has now gotten far too expensive and the younger generation have far more money than them and less taste. They declare to their friends and sometimes in public that they have had enough, and art isn’t what it used to be. A few years ago American collectors like the Rubells were saying it. Nowadays you can hear prominent German collectors like Ingvild Goetz and Harald Falckenberg say much the same thing. In the seventies and eighties, there were others, but I wasn’t around then.

Saatchi and Lindemann used to be two of the bigger fish in the art world pond – now they are just prawns on the seabed. They have been swept aside by Russian oligarch and Gulf Sheikh billionaires.

But there’s a couple things that makes these recantations more important than others that have come before. Firstly, in previous eras, a surge in prices for art followed economic growth – this time the opposite is the case. It’s the economic downturn, the fragility of commodities and shares that are boosting investment in art. The worse it gets for most of us, the more art costs – that’s a grim economic formula! Secondly, in other recessions, political protest has been directed against governments, banks, big corporations, but not the art world. But this time the art world is a target. The origins of Lindemann and Saatchi’s thoughts can surely be traced back to a unique little-reported protest that took place on February 16th in New York, when protestors occupied and disrupted a contemporary art sale, unfurling a banner that read “Orgy of the Rich.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKtznT4kEFY). It seems that that message, having been brought to the heart of the art world, has been taken to heart by some.

Whatever their defects, Saatchi and Lindemann share one thing in common. Against the background of today’s global economic crisis, they find the conspicuous consumption of contemporary art revolting – and rightly so. The tougher the austerity measures, the higher the prices paid for art – that’s the logic so it would seem. The art market’s most thorough investigator and commentator Sarah Thornton recently revealed in The Economist that a record was broken for the most expensive work of art ever sold: a painting, believed to be by a French Post-Impressionist went to the Qataris for $250m in a private sale. The art world is feeling a little guilty, it seems.

Saatchi and Lindemann are coming to the realisation that the great contemporary art bubble – both in its prices and the choice of art that costs those prices – shows that something has gone terribly wrong with both the world economy and the human imagination. The prices paid for contemporary art by today’s billionaires reveal nothing about the quality of art. They speak to us about the Bladerunner-type society that is emerging, divided between a tiny elite of superrich and the rest of us, the underclass, who are losing our pensions. They speak to us about the fragility of the economic climate, in which contemporary art seems a relatively safe asset to invest in – and yet appropriately the one with no intrinsic value whatsoever. They speak to us about financial transactions of borderline legality and of insider dealing in the unregulated market that is the art world. They speak to us about where much of the money spent by bail-out funds on buying bonds went – into the pockets of financiers and speculators.

There is a sense that the market is itself falling victim to an analogous problem of inequality that besets the broad economy.  The market is relying on an ever smaller elite of ever-richer collectors, supporting the market by paying ever larger sums for a tiny number of works of art. Many collectors have now become priced out and feel themselves demoted into a second division of the market. They feel betrayed by a system that they built.  Lindemann and Saatchi are the first of these disgruntled whistleblowers. That kind of art market is not sustainable in the medium term.

Read Ben’s article about the new book The History of the Saatchi Gallery, the past and future of Charlies Saatchi … and how he saved Ben’s life:

“I am probably the only person who can truly say that Charles Saatchi saved my life. During the holidays in 1986 I worked as a gallery assistant in Charles’s Boundary Road gallery in northwest London, during the installation of the Richard Serra and Anselm Kiefer exhibition. I got to drill the holes for hooks in the back of the wooden supports of Kiefer paintings. It was nerve-wracking – one false move and there could be a hole in a £1m masterpiece. At the end of every day I swept the gallery clean of the straw that had fallen off these visceral, apocalyptic landscapes, where paint was mixed with earth, grass and photographs.

I was 19 and earned £80 a week. Cranes were used to position Richard Serra’s sculptures in which 1-ton slabs or rolls of rusting steel and lead leaned against each other. These works are quite possibly the most important sculptures of the past 50 years, with their dramatic but abstracted sense of danger, built on the simplest arrangements of materials – leaning, propping and balancing .They could also be lethal: one technician had already been killed installing a Serra in America, and the artist himself had spent months in a wheelchair after another accident.

One day Charles came on a lightning tour of the gallery to see how the installation was going ….”

click here for the full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jul/10/charles-saatchi-british-art-yba

MUSEUMS ARE BAD AT TELLING US WHY ART MATTERS
Intelligence Squared debate at the Saatchi Gallery, 21 June 2011

Ben speaking at 23:17

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/debates.htm

Ben looks back over his busy week at the Venice Biennale 2011:

Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Sebastian Smee wrote a review about Art Safari, which will be screened at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Click here to read it!

Smee is an internationally acclaimed art critic, writing for the Boston Globe in Sydney. He spend part of his life in London, where he was art critic at the Daily Telegraph and a contributor to The Guardian, The Times, The Financial Times, The Independent on Sunday, The Art Newspaper, Modern Painters, and Prospect magazine. He is the author of books and essays on Lucian Freud as well as ‘Side by Side: Picasso v. Matisse’.

Do you want to win a FREE Art Safari DVD or any other film by Ben Lewis?

All you have to do is post a review on a website or blog of a film by Ben Lewis that you have seen, or already have on DVD. If you haven’t seen any of these films, you can buy streaming tickets to individual films on www.artsafari.tv for prices starting from £1.50! Or buy one DVD and then review it on the internet, and get another for free.

There are only a 4 conditions:

1.Your review must be over 200 words long.
2. Your review must be truthful. If you love my series, tell people why! And if you have criticisms then tell people about them too! Be honest! And be fun!
3. Your review must contain links to our website shops in the final sentence: ‘You can buy DVDs by Ben Lewis at www.artsafari.tv, www.benlewis.tv
and www.amazon.co.uk’
4. The review has to be written with your own words, i.e. no plagiarism.

Then send us a link to your on-line review at info@benlewis.tv, so we can read it, and we will send you a DVD. It’s that simple!

This competition is running initially for a one month period.

Ben will be speaking at ‘Some Conference’ in Halle (Saale) / Germany.

http://www.burg-halle.de/someconference/

It takes place on Thursday, 9 June 2011.
The conference intersects at the crossroads of art and design and it will be curated and run by students.
This year’s theme is ‘Profit – The end result’. Many things in our surroundings rely on growth, but the constant thought of “more output (from less input)” is bound to approach its limits. How do artists and designers deal with this phenomenon? How do they develop solutions to this problem, and how does it affect their own work?

The goal of the conference is to cross conventional borders and to depict new and exciting interfaces.
Participation is free of charge.

You’ve go to admire their chutzpah. The list of omissions in the Royal Academy’s Modern British Sculpture show was staggering. I had to go round it four times to make sure that the names I missed really weren’t there. No Anish Kapoor, even though the RA put on a solo show by him last year. No Rachael Whiteread, though she has done the Fourth Plinth and Turbine Hall. No Tracey Emin, though her bed and tent are classic sculptures of our time.  No Anthony Gormley, author of Britain’s most famous public sculpture  after Nelson’s column, ‘The Angel of the North’. No Richard Deacon, whose curved wooden contructions were ubiquitous in the eighties. No Chapmans. No Elizabeth Frink, the Granny’s favourite.  OK so I did miss the Richard Wentworth, but it was only a video.
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FULL ARTICLE CLICK HERE PAGE 14-15

BEST ARTICLE comes courtesy of

THE TOP 20 MOST POWERLESS PEOPLE IN THE ART WORLD

A few weeks ago Art Review announced the TOP 100 power brokers in the art world but we thought they missed the real story.  So Hyperallergic has released its own list of the people who have neer received their moment in the sun.

CLICK HERE

“The Top 20 Most Powerless People in the Art World”

Contributing to Programma Magazines second issue, Ben questions the criteria by which art today should be judged, in a provocative article that calls for the return of certain standards in an ear plagued by decadence. . .

CLICK HERE to read Article in Full

HAVE YOUR SAY  . . .

BBC’s The Culture Show are looking for your opinions on where the future of Art is going.

CLICK HERE

to log on and have your say.

Award-winning documentary-maker, internationally published art critic and all round Art Geek,  Ben Lewis is heading off on safari once more to find out who’s hot and why Art Safari broke the mould of Contemporary Arts Documentary when it first launched in 2003.  The original 4 x 28′ series was an instant hit with viewers delivering quality profile documentary with a fresh, quirky and inquisitive approach. Series 2 followed soon after, winning the prestigious Grimme Sonderpries Kultur and New York Festvials World Bronze in 2007.ART SAFARI has since been broadcast in over 25 countries world-wide.  The DVD’s are stocked in the some of the most popular art institutions, The Tate Modern, The Serpentine Gallery, Hamburger Bahnhof, Pompidou, Palais de Toyko and scores of other Museums and galleries across the world.NOW join Ben in his new ART SAFARI adventures, where he will seek once again – sometimes energetically, sometimes Heroically, sometimes incompetently and sometimes hilariously – to explore the complicated characters and unravel the complex ideas of contemporary artists.   This new series will present the big theories and latest developments in contemporary art.Art Safari 1 and 2 followed the ebullient and unstoppable rise of contemporary art, 2003-8, and introduced television audiences to its new stars and celebrities – like Matthew Barney, Takashi Murakami, Maurizio Cattelan and Santiago Sierra. While the series style remains the same, this time the post boom landscape of contemporary art is radically different. Now the contemporary art bubble has burst, a new art world is beginning to take shape.  But what is the shape?That is the question. . . .THIS IS THE SERIES.

  Photo: Yves Géant

SOPHIE CALLE

The 2010 Hasselblad Award Winner

Sophie Calle has been selected as the 30th winner of the Hasselblad Foundation international Award in Photography. The Award will be presented to Sophie Calle in Goteborg City Theatre, Sweden, in October 2010.  In conjunction with tthe ceremony an exhibit of the award winner’s work, SOPHIE CALLE – 2010 Hasselblad Award Winner will open a the Hasselblad Centre at the Goteborg Museum of Art. 

 For more information CLICK HERE