AUTUMN/WINTER 2009
ISSUE 1
ART. CULTURE. NEWS
Frame Will there be a turn around for this years Turner Prize winner?
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CHARLES SAATCHI NEWS HOW A NEW EXHIBITION TAKES YOU BACK TO THE WORLD OF POP ART AND ANDY WARHOL. DAMIEN HIRST, GENIUS OR FAKE? EVERYONE’S FAVOURITE DAME (THAT’S VIVIENNE WESTWOOD TO THOSE WHO DON’T KNOW) TAKES ON HOME FURNISHING, AND WINS. ALL YOU EVER NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE TURNER PRIZE. Frame Magazine Issue 1 - Autumn/Winter 2009
“What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.” - Octavio Paz
All enquiries to thoughts@framemagazine. com
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Hanging out with the modern art crowd; a recent example of art work exhibited at the Saatchi gallery.
THE NAMES’CHARLES, CHARLES SAATCHI
The ringleader of modern art treats the viewing public to a competetion to find a groundbreaking artist. (Just don’t expect Saatchi to appear on camera.)
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new programme broadcast on BBC2 aims to shine a spotlight on the contemporary art world by searching for the next “big thing”. Charles Saatchi is lending his name to the programme, “School of Saatchi”, despite not appearing in any episodes to maintain his fierce levels of privacy. Original line up of contestants The man credited for fathering (not literally!) the Young British Artists is on the hunt for a new artist to put on a pedestal and hopes his Apprentice style search will be the key to finding this elusive person. While Saatchi may want to hide away out of the media spotlight there are plenty of art world figures who are happy to separate the artists from
the part time hobby painters. Judges include Tracey Emin, art critic Matthew Collings, curator Kate Bush and collector Frank Cohen, all of whom are acting as spies in the camp, on behalf of the reclusive Saatchi. The first instalment of the programme has received acclaim from several media institutions such as The Guardian for bringing the discussion of “What is art?” to the forefront of the argument. While many are sure that modern art is nothing but nonsense, Tracey Emin and company are managing to challenge the public’s perception, and ultimately stand their ground for the lucrative world in which they belong.
Following our story the winner of School of Saatchi was announced to be 20 year old art Slade School of Art student Eugenie Scrase. Her work, “Trunkated Trunk”, a tree trunk found impaled on a fence, caused much deabte between judges, with Tracey Emin describing the young artists attitude as “genius.” French born Scrase from Bukingham described her win as “mind blowing”, after beating off five incredibly talented artists. Her prize was her own studio space for a year, with the bonus of being championed and exhibited by Saatchi in some of the world’s most prestigious galleries. Scrase gave her studio space to runner up artist, Matt Clark, who also caught Saatchi’s eye, as she currently uses her art school space and is not in any rush for her own studio. We predict Scrase will be one to keep an eye out for in the future. Have we discovered the new Tracey Emin? Send us your opinions on whether you think Scrases “Trunkated Trunk”, found on a fence in North London, constitues as “art”. thoughts@framemagazine.com
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The Jesus of Pop (art!)
Andy Warhol. 1928- 1987 A leading figure in painting, printmaking and film. He was seen as the founder of the Pop Art movement.
A new exhibition in London’s Tate Modern gallery plans to trace the routes of the Pop Art generation. From Andy Warhol to Jeff Koons, every picture tells a thousand words.
Pop Life: Art in a Material World proposes a re-reading of one of the major legacies of Pop Art. The exhibition takes Andy Warhol’s notorious provocation that ‘good business is the best art’ as a starting point in reconsidering the legacy of Pop Art and the influence of the movement’s chief protagonist. Pop Life: Art in a Material World looks ahead to the various ways that artists since the 1980s have engaged with mass media and cultivated artistic personas creating their own signature ‘brands’. Among the artists represented are Tracey Emin, Keith Haring, Damien Hirst, Martin Kippenberger, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and Richard Prince. Pop Life: Art in a Material World argues that Warhol’s most radical lesson is reflected in the work of artists of subsequent generations who, rather than simply representing or commenting upon our mass media culture, have infiltrated the publicity machine and the marketplace as a deliberate strategy. Harnessing the power of the celebrity system and expanding their reach
beyond the art world and into the wider world of commerce, these artists exploit channels that engage audiences both inside and outside the gallery. The conflation of culture and commerce is typically seen as a betrayal of the values associated with modern art; this exhibition contends that, for many artists working after Warhol, to cross this line is to engage with modern life on its own terms. “Good business is the best art” Andy Warhol The show begins with a focused look at Warhol’s late work, examining his related initiatives as a television personality, paparazzo, and publishing impresario. Highlights include a number of works from his initially controversial series known as the Retrospectives or Reversals. Reprising his celebrated Pop icons from the 1960s, in a manner initially deemed cynical, the Retrospectives look ahead to installations by a number of artists including Martin Kippenberger and Tracey Emin, who overtly engage the self-mythologizing impulse manipulating their personas as a medium, like silkscreen or paint. Pop Life: Art in a Material World includes reconstructions of both Keith Haring’s Pop Shop and Jeff Koons’s seldom reunited Made in Heaven. Haring opened the Pop Shop in 1986 on New
York’s Lafayette St. to merchandise his branded artistic signature as editioned objects such as t-shirts, toys and magnets aimed at as wide an audience as possible. Jeff Koons’s Made in Heaven, which debuted at the Venice Bienniale in 1990, immortalized his marital union with the Italian porn star and politician known as La Cicciolina. A specially-commissioned new installation by the celebrated Japanese artist Takashi Murakami debuts in the exhibition’s final gallery. A gallery dedicated to the so-called ‘Young British Artists’ focuses on their early performative exploits including ephemera from Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas’s shop in Bethnal Green where they created and sold their work. Renowned pieces such as Gavin Turk’s Pop 1993 also feature, as does selected works representing Damien Hirst’s recent Sotheby’s auction, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever. Tate Modern will also restage Hirst’s performance originally shown at Cologne’s ‘Unfair’ art fair in 1992. Identical twins will sit beneath two identical spot paintings for the duration of Pop Life: Art in a Material World. Tate Modern is appealing for identical twins to take part in this performance.
WESTWOOD HEADS EAST, BOYCOTTING FASHION FOR HOME FURNISHINGS Vivienne Westood is taking the interior world by storm after launching a range of wallpapers in her tradmark outlandish patterns.
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he infamous fashion designer Vivienne Westwood has hung up her boots, temporarily, of course, for a new career path in designing home furnishings, with the aid of her husband, Andreas Kronthaler. The 68 year old Dame who was awarded her OBE for services to fashion has designed a range of wallpapers for the respected manufacturer Cole & Son. Westwood is heavily involved in campaigning for awareness of global warming issues and has incorporated her eccentric “Squiggle” and “ Lace” prints into her homeware designs. With a buzz circulating amongst interior design companies the designs are believed to be selling successfully and making a mark amongst the interior industry. Dame Vivienne was born in Cheshire in 1941 and has been credited for bringing the punk aesthetic to the forefront of the design world. Her early adulthood was spent working as a primary teacher before finding her feet in fashion in the early 70’s. After a marriage to Malcolm McLaren, then manager of the Sex Pistols, Westwood went on to create her signature safety pin dresses and corsetry. She is now married to her third husband, Andreas Kronthaler, a former fashion student of hers from Austria. Her early adulthood was spent working as a primary teacher before finding her feet in fashion in the early 70’s. After a marriage to Malcolm McLaren, then manager of the Sex Pistols,
Westwood went on to create her signature safety pin dresses and corsetry. She is now married to her third husband, Andreas Kronthaler, a former fashion student of hers from Austria. Westwood went on to create her signature safety pin dresses and corsetry. She is now married to her third husband, Andreas Kronthaler, a former fashion student of hers from Austria. Westwood went on to create her signature safety pin dresses and corsetry. She is now married to her third husband, Andreas Kronthaler, a former fashion student of hers from Austria. Westwood went on to create her signature safety pin dresses and corsetry. She is now married to her third husband, Andreas Kronthaler, a former fashion student of hers from Austria. Westwood went on to create her signature safety pin dresses and corsetry. She is now married to her third husband, Andreas Kronthaler, a former fashion student of hers from Austria. Westwood went on to create her signature safety pin dresses and corsetry. She is now married to her third husband, Andreas Kronthaler, a former fashion student of hers from Austria.
All enqueries about the Westwood range can be reached via 0800 345 678
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PAGE 5 ‘deeply connected to the past.’” Putting paint on canvas is certainly a new direction for Hirst and, where Hirst goes, art students are likely to follow... oil painting could become trendy again. About.com’s Guide to London Travel, Laura Porter, went to the press preview of Hirst’s exhibition and got an answer to the one question I was really keen to know, what blue pigments was he using? Laura was told it was “Prussian blue for all except one of the 25 paintings, which is black.” No wonder it’s such a dark, smoldering blue! Art critic Adrian Searle of The Guardian wasn’t very favorable about Hirst’s paintings: “At its worst, Hirst’s drawing just looks amateurish and adolescent. His brushwork lacks that oomph and panache that makes you believe in the painter’s lies. He can’t yet carry it off.”
Oh, Damien! Mad as a hatter; Damien Hirst
THE RISE AND FALL OF DAMIEN HIRST The controversial and acclaimed Damien Hirst has thrown in the towel for creating eccentric art and gone back to tradtional routes of paint brush and canvas.
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amien Hirst, you know the name, right? You think you know what he does and how he does it? That’s all about to change as Hirst leaves his extreme shark suspended in formaldehyde days behind and embraces the old fashioned way of art; painting. Much has been said about Hirst’s sudden departure from using shock tactics to garner support, but what he does leave us with after his marathon painting session in his studio at the end of the garden, is a body of work that is both haunting and relatively unique. I say “relatively”, because it would have been entirely unique, if it weren’t for Francis Bacon creating similar grotesquely beautiful paintings decades earlier.
British artist Damien Hirst is most famous for his animals preserved in formaldehyde, but in his early 40s returned to oil painting. In October 2009 he exhibited paintings created between 2006 to 2008 for the first time in London. This an example of a not-yet famous painting by a famous artist comes from his exhibition at the Wallace Collection in London entitled “No Love Lost”. (Dates: 12 October 2009 to 24 January 2010.) BBC News quoted Hirst as saying “he is now solely painting by hand”, that for two years his “paintings were embarrassing and I didn’t want anyone to come in.” and that he “had to re-learn to paint for the first time since he was a teenage art student.”1 The press release accompanying the Wallace exhibition said Hirst’s “’Blue Paintings’ bear witness to a bold new direction in his work; a series of paintings that, in the artist’s words are
The death of art; Hirst’s recent foray into paiting
Adrian Searle of the Guardian was one of the first to criticise the works of Hirst, giving this scathing review on the artists “talent”, or in his mind, lack of said talent. Damien Hirst’s paintings hang in a single, long space at the Wallace Collection, on walls covered in blue silk with a vertical stripe. The setting is extremely theatrical – just like the rest of the museum. Through a doorway, at a distance, is Nicolas Poussin’s late 1630s Dance to the Music of Time. This stares back at Hirst’s painting of a single skull, on a murky blue-black background. Hirst locates himself at the sharp end of art history. This is brave. It is also hubristic. Threehundred and seventy years stand between Hirst’s No Love Lost and Poussin. In the rooms beyond hang Titian and Frans Hals, Rembrandt and any number of gilded rococo fripperies. But the artist Hirst is really confronting here is Francis Bacon, the absent ghost at the feast.
PAGE 6 Bacon’s pin-striped businessmen from the 1950s appear to provide Hirst’s model. Instead of anxious executives, though, Hirst gives us the skull without the skin: skull after skull floating in blue gloom, along with glass ashtrays, cigarettes and lighters and glasses of water – half-full or half-empty, like life itself. It’s the old mortality shtick. There’s a shark’s jaw, open like a man-trap, an iguana that looks more dead than alive, and the odd stag beetle. Everything is rendered in white against a fullstrength blue-black that is as chemical and coppery as spilled ink. This colour infects everything it touches. The only flashes of colour are provided by the occasional lemon, a bit of intrusive dull green foliage, the plastic lighters. Rows of white dots decorate some paintings, in memory of Hirst’s interminable dot paintings, and most of the images are traversed by spidery white lines, like cracks in a pane of glass, or Bacon’s figure-trapping space frames. They outline the corners of tables or rooms, but most signify nothing more than the semblance of some sort of thoughtful, structural drawing. My suspicion is that they’re there just to give the surface a bit of life.
Birth of Medusa is the hoariest. Others are called Guardian. I think of lurking editors hanging about in the woods, waiting to pounce. There’s a lot of niggling overdrawing. In the 1950s Bacon was great at scribbling-in far-off figures or clunky cars on a distant highway. Hirst cannot compete. Bacon’s work had an air of authority; he also exercised a lot of quality control, and threw the things that didn’t work out. I don’t think Hirst does. This is painting as method acting. He just keeps at it. Hirst’s paintings lack the kind of theatricality and grandeur that made Bacon succeed. At its worst, Hirst’s drawing just looks amateurish and adolescent. His brushwork lacks that oomph and panache that makes you believe in the painter’s lies. He can’t yet carry it off. I want to be encouraging. It’s tough, trying to out-paint your influences, tougher still to keep failing at it so publicly. As a painter, I too tried and failed. Whatever his borrowings, Hirst did all this himself, unaided by his armies of assistants. He fills up his art with dead things: even the iguanas look stuffed. But these paintings are a memento mori for a reputation.”
Who were the Young British Artists (YBA’S) and what did they “do”? Young British Artists or YBAs (also Brit artists and Britart) is the name given to a group of conceptual artists, painters, sculptors and installation artists based in the United Kingdom, most (though not all) of whom attended Goldsmiths College in London. The term Young British Artists is derived from shows of that name staged at the Saatchi Gallery from 1992 onwards, which brought the artists to fame. It has become a historic term, as most of the YBAs are now in their forties. They are noted for “shock tactics”, use of throwaway materials and wild-living, and are (or were) associated with the Hoxton area of East London. They achieved considerable media coverage and dominated British art during the 1990s. Leading artists of the group are Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. Below is a brief list of YBA’S who you can research until your heart’d content.
Requiem, White Roses and Butterflies
As well as Bacon, Jasper Johns’s skulls are somewhere in the mix; Alberto Giacometti’s worrying, nervous line; a touch of English neo-romanticism; and, perhaps most of all, the spectral phantoms of American painter Ross Bleckner, which similarly glow with a frosty chill against the eternal dark. Other Hirsts here depict dull, crusty roses in a vase, surrounded by flitting butterflies. The paint on the butterflies is all puckered up, as if Hirst has kissed them on to the surface. This is a nice touch. The most successful works depict figures, halfhidden behind scuffed-on branches and tree trunks, which remind you of Bacon’s paintings of Van Gogh going to work. The titles are toecurling and portentous, though: Witness at the
And we leave the final decision up to you, is Hirst a revolutionary artist who can turn his hand to anything and create art gold? Or is he just a beneficiary of good press and enviable contacts. We ask for your thoughts on all burning issues in art and look forward to reading your thoughts, ideas and questions. thoughts@ framemagazine.com
Steven Adamson Angela Bulloch Mat Collishaw Ian Davenport Angus Fairhurst Anya Gallaccio Damien Hirst Gary Hume Michael Landy Abigail Lane Sarah Lucas Lala Meredith-Vula Richard Patterson Stephen Park Fiona Rae Fiona Banner Christine Borland Simon Callery The Chapman Brothers - Dinos & Jake Adam Chodzko Tacita Dean Tracey Emin Liam Gillick Douglas Gordon Sam-Taylor Wood Martin Maloney Steve McQueen Chris Ofili Marc Quinn Jenny Saville Gillian Wearing
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Turner Prize; the facts
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he Turner Prize, is it an enigma? A well disguised competition for art adults with the determination of small kids? It’s all those things and more. Born in 1984’s the prize has gathered speed over the years to include some of the world’s most revered and controversial art works in the contemporary art world. Damien Hirst cultivated his notorious public image through his Turner entries, namely the cow suspended n Thommeldye and his lucid spot paintings. Tracey Emin, now the most recognisable female figures in the contemporary art made her name from the unmade bed she displayed for public and and art critics consumption. The prize is now the most dominant competition in the Western world, sparking controvery the moment the shortlist of the artists become a public document. Last year it was won by a man parading around London encased in a bear suit. Is this art? Or a misguided notion on madness? What we can be sure of is that the Turner Prize shows no sign of slowing down. This years shortlist has managed to divide opinion, with many calling it the first year “ real” art has been included. Following on from this the original Turner artist, Damien Hirst, has turned his billionaire back on his almost grotesque previous creations in favour of dabbling in the age old tradition of putting paint brush to canvas. The results are steeped in Francis Bacon style imagery, all black and skull like, a modern morality tale for the art set. And with that we leave The Turner Prize for another year, busy awaiting the verdict that is already geared up to divide opinion in magnificent ways. God bless The Turner Prize, we wouldn’t have it any other way.
Art? Or a misguided notion of madness? The Turner Prize. YOU decide.
The Turner Prize was set up in 1984 to celebrate new developments in contemporary art. The prize is awarded each year to a British artist under fifty for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work in the twelve months preceding'. Nominations are invited each year, and the prize is judged by an independent jury that changes annually. The four shortlisted artists present works in a show normally held at Tate Britain before the winner is announced in December. Artists are not judged on their show at Tate. The decision is based on the work they were nominated for. The prize was founded by a group called the Patrons of New Art. They were formed in 1982 to help buy new art for the Tate Gallery's collection, and to encourage wider interest in contemporary art. The Patrons wanted a name associated with great British art. They chose JMW Turner (1775–1851) partly because he had wanted to establish a prize for young artists. He also seemed appropriate because his work was controversial in his own day. Damien Hirst won the prize in 1995. There was no age limit at first, but in 1991 it was decided to restrict the Prize to artists under fifty, so that younger artists just setting out weren't pitted against artists at the height of their careers. The first sponsor was Oliver Prenn, though he remained anonymous at the time. He was a founder member of the Patrons of New Art. The prize money was £10,000 for the first three years. He was followed in 1987 by Drexel Burnham Lambert International Inc., an American investment company. They sponsored the prize until 1989. The prize was suspended for a year in 1990 when the company went bankrupt. Channel 4 was the sponsor from 1991- 2003 and the prize money was raised to £20,000. From 2004 - 2007Gordon's sponsored the prize and the value was increased to £40,000. Of the winners: 18% have been nominated for painting. 32% have been nominated for sculptures/installations 27% have been nominated for mixed media/ other 14% have been nominated for film/video installations 9% have been nominated for photography.