The artist Marek Zulawski, translation & Polish-British culture

Hi,

My father wasn't just an artist, but also an art journalist and critic. Below is my translation of his thoughts on the New Art exhibition at the Tate (now the Tate Britain) back in 1983. 

The exhibition included around 90 artists, so it was pretty big, with works by people who are famous today like Anthony Gormley (creator of the huge Angel of the North statue in Gateshead) and Anish Kapoor (creator of that big silver bean in Millennium Park in Chicago).

But my father doesn't seem to find much to praise. His words also show how, even 42 years ago, the contemporary art scene was a bit of a con.

---

The artificial creation of geniuses has become a lucrative business

Catalogue for the New Art exhibition at the Tate, 1983, via roomandbook.co.uk

There's a huge exhibition on at the Tate Gallery called “New Art.” What does that mean?  

Does the fact that this respected modern art museum has organised an exhibition with a title like that imply that some new artistic movement has suddenly emerged? Not at all. No new movement with a clear identity, like Cubism or Surrealism, has appeared, nor is this Tate exhibition a harbinger of any such thing. 

Modern art today — like a river splitting into a thousand streams as it flows into a tangled delta — contributes a whole array of tendencies to our general cultural pool, and they are often contradictory and theoretically mutually exclusive. Because the most striking fact when it comes to contemporary art is that it has no single dominant direction today.

In this vast and chaotic exhibition, centre stage is taken up by German and Italian painters, along with their American counterparts. So, the Germans: Joseph Beuys, Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke, Anselm Kiefer, Penck, Lüpertz, Immendorff… Their art is distinctly aggressive, bearing unmistakably German national traits, and in this regard, it harks back to that old Expressionism familiar to us from the works of Nolde, Kirchner and Beckmann. Next come the Italians: Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi, Mario Merz and Giulio Paolini, for whom the most characteristic feature is their irrationalism. The Americans of German and Italian descent seem to follow in the footsteps of their European cousins.

When it comes to the British artists, their common trait is irony and stylistic pluralism, a mentality that's more European than American, drawing from Marcel Duchamp, Magritte, Chirico and Picabia. For example, the young British sculptor Bill Woodrow creates installations from car doors, ironing boards, refrigerators cut into jagged shapes, and feathers resembling the headdresses of Native American chiefs. Scott Burton is exhibiting a rough block of black lava with a seat carved out of it, while Barry Flanagan presents his now-famous hares.

Yes, hares. They would hardly be worth mentioning if not for the fact that Barry Flanagan, now 42, has recently become incredibly famous worldwide — precisely thanks to these hares. Over the past two years, Flanagan’s hares have been exhibited everywhere. In December 1981, they were displayed in leading London galleries, in March 1982 in Tokyo, in May in Osaka, and in June, a herd of Flanagan’s hares represented England at the Venice Biennale. Others were seen at Documenta in Kassel before hopping over to West Berlin for a terrible Expressionist exhibition titled Zeitgeist. They have since returned to England, although they are meant to triumphantly transfer to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. They will soon be greeting onlookers in Warsaw, unless they are already there.

Barry Flanagan works, photo by Stephen White & Co via theguardian.com

This is a dizzying career for sculptures that scarcely deserve such a label. Because Flanagan’s hares are trivial, unimpressive sketches. These clay impressions later cast in bronze are banal in their pseudo-realism. They are usually of unnatural sizes — sometimes too small, sometimes too large. I’ve seen one the size of a racehorse leaping over an obstacle. Some hares stand on tripods, others perch atop an ordinary bell like a weather vane on a church, while others perform circus tricks, stand on their hind legs, run upright or box like humans.

Completely stupid gimmickry.

Recently, Flanagan has been making stone sculptures as well. These fairly large and rounded lumps are meant to be beautiful marble magnifications of the handfuls of clay that every sculptor unconsciously shapes in their hand while working. These enlargements of random forms were made for him by two skilled Italian stonemasons, but I did once see a sculpture created purely by Flanagan. It was a large toad made from white alabaster — a testament to this famous sculptor's extraordinarily inept technical and compositional prowess.

So alongside bad painting, it seems bad sculpture is also becoming, as we can observe, a way of gaining international fame. Why is it like this — hard to say. Perhaps it stems from the ever-deepening spiritual poverty of our materialistic civilisation and the marginalisation of art that comes with it. Art once held a central position alongside religion in humanity's life, but it's now relegated to the sidelines where it must attract attention through absurdities or inarticulate gestures. Unfortunately.

Also included in the exhibition are narcissistic, tragic and simultaneously ironic new portraits by Gilbert & George, who paint together. Gilbert & George treat themselves as a work of art, which is characteristic of countercultures like punk and transvestitism.

Overall, this new Tate exhibition is incredibly interesting, though not as an expression of enthusiasm (as its organisers stubbornly claim), but rather as a clear display of desperation, coming from artists wanting to be noticed at any cost. Noticed, of course, not by the public but by influential critics and museums. The general public doesn’t count, as they became alienated from modern art long ago, neither understanding it nor finding any use for it.

If this exhibition proves anything, it is perhaps simply that we can today observe anarchy in every area of life and custom. It is also more evidence that, in the absence of a broader demand for art, an artist must resort to nearly terrorist-like excesses to gain people's attention — excesses that don't have any artistic meaning, but solely commercial logic.

Large international advertising firms, like Saatchi & Saatchi, allocate capital to so-called avant-garde artworks, just so they can sell them later — thanks to skilful advertising and mass media — for incomparably higher prices to museums around the world (the only serious market left) as examples of New Art. Public galleries, eager to appear sophisticated, feel obliged to acquire these works as part of their philatelic purchasing policies. The artistic merit of these pieces does not play much of a role in this process. In any case, it is not decisive.

The artificial creation of geniuses has become a lucrative business for those who can spare the funds for the necessary investments. Unfortunately.

Charles and Maurice Saatchi in 1985, via dailymail.co.uk

In a recent retrospective of Flanagan's work, The Guardian also said his hares were crap, asking "Why on earth did this artist dedicate himself to hares for three decades?"

---

The Art of Translation, according to Jennifer Croft

Here's a 17-min audio interview with Jennifer Croft, the award-winning translator of Olga Tokarczuk's Flights and The Books of Jacob. She talks about the differences in translating different languages, why you should never translate your own writing, and why it's important translators' names are on book covers along with the author.

---

That's all for this week. Many thanks for reading. If you want to support the newsletter, please forward it to a friend or donate here.

Adam

Adam Zulawski

TranslatingMarek.com / TranslatePolishMemoirs.com / Other stuff

👉 Help fund the translation of Studium do autoportretu via Paypal 👈

Sent this by someone else?

Subscribe