What is
it that makes people like, hang on their walls and imitate artists like Jack Vettriano (Mad Dogs…
or The Singing Butler), Yoshizo Kawasaki (Poppies),
Nicholas Verrall (Le
Dejeuner en Provence) and Chen Yifei (Lingering
Melodies from the Xunyang River)? All artists who
are genuinely popular in the sense that the demand for affordable copies of
their images has lead to their mass reproduction and so grace the walls of
homes and workplaces as well as being found on greetings cards for special
occasions.
It would
appear that a new generation of popular favourites has arrived to rival and
even replace the previous incumbents, Monet and the Impressionists (and not
forgetting Van Gough) which had itself replaced a fad for paintings of a yet
earlier epoch: the Pre-Raphaelites and Constable, together with the (more
recent) poster art of Alphonse Mucha. However the
distinguishing feature of today’s generation of popular choice is that the
artists of choice are of a similar generation; are alive and active today (until recently this was only true of the poster art of Roger
Dean or Geiger, both appealing almost exclusively to teenage and young adult
constituencies).
Inheriting
the mantle of Edward Hopper (canonised as a ‘serious’ artist, yet one who is
also popular - that is reproduced and disseminated through posters) Jack Vettriano has been adopted, like many others, against the
‘taste’ of the critics (many of whom persist in applying an Adorno
their fathers rejected to images and objects he would have regarded a
commercial barbarism). Vettriano has also been chosen
against what are all-too-often taken for (and worse, presented as) fashions of
some intellectual pretension (that is caste markers of ‘taste’, class and
cultural hierarchy). Against these, Vettriano is
associated with a popular art whose images are usually simple, clear, direct,
often whimsical, occasionally doing ‘sexy’; but never too
serious, nor too striking, nor indeed too original, and certainly never too
ambitious neither in form nor content (not at all like its antithesis in
painting, the work of the German artist, Anselm Keifer).
One of
the secrets of Vettriano’s success undoubtedly lies
in his representations of the sexual dance (although the two paintings
mentioned above, Mad Dogs… and The Singing Butler, upon which his mass
popularity is based, hint at a more idyllic, innocent and far less darker world
than that featured in most of his work). A dance requiring a careful and
‘classy’ dressing up (accompanied by a comparatively ‘low-life’ staging) which
reveals a fantasy world inhabited, not only by the painter (who freely admits
his inspiration) but also by his audience… and so offers-up a valuable insight
for the present day sexual anthropologist. These representations of a world
dominated by sexual desire occur in a form of popular art which side-steps the
usual popular genres of desire and the image, the pin-ups of sexual hagiography
and the (near) pornography of poster nudes beloved of male (straight)
calendars, to convey a sexual tension that is at once stylised and knowing
(just as the roles, props and clothing are both stereotypical and theatrical,
poses adopted for a purpose, a masquerade of sexual functionalism). What the
sexual charge which accompanies so many of Vettriano’s
darker images reveals is an audience equally staged in its fantasy repertoire,
but conscious in its deliberate self-dramatisation. This is a game that will
continue for as long as the film,
This kind
of popular art is defined against another kind of art which has come to popular
attention: YBA (the Young British Art of the 1990s). Imported from the USA
after Jeff Koons, as an after-echo of American
Post-conceptualism, inheritor and death knell of its parent, Conceptualism (as
also of Minimalism and the found object traditions, together comprising the
radical art movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s). A shallow echo of their ambition
(now reduced to moneymaking alone) an empty joke at their expense (consisting
as it does of a single shock, provoking a short-lived-smile). These objects and
images are popular in the sense of notorious - and primarily aimed at the
museum, or private collector (private as in gallery owning). High Art and the
Mass Media here perform the final fusion that belies their putative opposition
(a fusion exactly mirroring that with popular art). One reduced to the
commodity as an object is reduced to an advertising gimmick, a specialist
(scarce) purchase with (generational) attitude, a media creation; the other
reproduced as a commodity for sale on the mass market, the sign of the popular.
The
visions of popular art, the entrails of popular life…
Comfort
Zone. Accessing fantasy but not challenging it. Supporting dreams not letting
in nightmares. (The very opposite of the function of the nightmare incarnate in
‘teenage’, ‘Goth’ or other art focussed on this most challenged of generations,
where the nightmare image is its own antidote, symbolic co-efficient of
internal conflicts and identity contradictions, expression of adolescent
emotion, as of a transitional identity torn in equal part between the infantile
and the adult, existing as the parody of both).
If one
were to hazard a temporality for this genre… the immediacy of a vivid
now-moment united to the landscapes of an un-apocalyptic eternity; a soft-focus
eternity, an eternal summer, as if in a dream. Rebellion and overturning (once
a candidate for rebellion’s adult form) are left behind with an adolescence
whose art they define. In general such an art is almost classical in its sense
of balance for not only must it tread the fine line between the temporal and
the eternal, but it must then be found to suit the interior décor and marry up with the fantasy within. In
effect an extension of ones inner core; framed and presented. A hanging
reminder of the hanging gardens within… (but one which must match the curtains).
Ideal
scenes. Benign Nature. The marriage of Nature and Culture. The image of the
garden is a utopian constant in our cultures and in the history of our
cultures. Its image haunts our literature and painting alike. The utopia of the
warm patio, the plenitude of the barbecue with friends, or just the silence of
the unsullied landscape. Magic nature also provides beautiful images as the
medicine which we would gladly take as the cure for our everyday lives, from
close-ups of flowers to near-abstracts owing more to the whimsical world of a Miro than the photography of a gardening magazine (giving
even Klee a popularity that his experimental forms would seem to deny).
The
pastoral image survives as a popular sub-genre now spread throughout our
culture. If peace has an image it is still that of the pastoral. And yet within
the history of the pastoral genres and of genres touched by the pastoral,
therein lies the rub. A ‘rub’, a friction, which still persists today, even in
the most anodyne of poster prints; the contrast between the depicted ideal and
the urban reality that would suggest a disquiet not easily assuaged by the
all-purpose medicine of the commodity (but let us remember nevertheless that
this is how our society circulates things and that those things which circulate
outside of these circuits are often not very edifying either).
Strung
between the sexual and the geographic, the sensual and the soporific, between
utopias, erotic and horticultural, between tamed Nature and (Human) Nature as Desire,
between the world of the Perfumed Garden and the Garden that we would take as
giving the lie to the world after the Fall, popular art insists on a simple
immediacy that nevertheless has its roots in the history of our culture and the
not-so-simple and very much divided history of our collective psyche.
Yet
whatever may be said against it, this is always a people’s art, an art for
people (not for galleries, museums, or even the private collectors who purchase
the originals only to lose them to mass reproduction and distribution, and so
must share the image with its mass audience, abandoning all pretension of
exclusivity).
Art for people’s homes.
Democratic
middlebrow.
Copyright
2005 Peter Nesteruk