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Charles Saatchi's new collection of American art is on show 6 october - 4 November 2006 at the Royal Academy and has some pretty good moments. The same globalised art-world themes: apocalyptic scenes of doubt and uncertainty, but this time brighter and more cheerful (more brittle?) than we saw at, say, Frieze 2006. Reassuringly uncanny, unnervingly homely. The current art paradox.
Jules de Balincourt is the best painter in the house. His U.S. World Studies paintings II and III, both 2005, present maps of the States (hints of Jasper Johns) that are inaccurately rendered or remembered, but pointedly if unsteadily geo-political. In III, roads that look like oil pipelines bring consumer electronics into the country. But equally they could be the veins that will bleed dry these red states. In II, the rest of the world is a dark terra incognita of small countries where you'd expect to see Canada... People Who Play and The People Who Pay, 2004 is also excellent: inside hotel towers, chambermaids and houseboys toil, putting rooms right and refilling mini-bars. Outside at the pool, the rich, happy, white people relax. (Remember the poker scene in Goldfinger - this time it's the hotel staff that contemptuously surveil the sunburned leisure class.) In all of these paintings, the masking-taped brushwork gives states and figures a pasted-in appearance, as if they risked being cut out again at any moment.
Adam Cvijanovic's Love Poem (10 minutes after the end of gravity) 2005 is lovely. Painted onto sheets of Tyvek - as used by Fedex and other parcel delivery companies - which are then assembled on the walls for each show, this room is a bright apocalyptic roadshow. In what looks like a bright Floridian sunshine, gravity had ended, and the man-made world is floating up into the sky. Houses rip apart lazily, spilling their contents in slow-mo. (You think of 2001: somehow, sound has ended too.) Down below, the natural world presumably remains, the slate wiped clean - it's a return-to-nature dream. But where are the people?
Erick Swenson's, Untitled, 2004-5 offers a dead deer with a contorted body, frozen on an icy tableau, icicles dangling from its antlers, glueing it to the cobbles.
Gerald Davis' Linsey's Poo, 2005: one half is a layered x-ray in pink and green of a tweenie's torso, showing her clothes, skin, organs and bowel, and beautifully painted. The other half, an image of her diary, is sub-Freudian claptrap.
Dana Schutz's Death Comes To Us All, 2003 looks like a chaotic, hallucinatory remix of Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly paintings of the 40s. Florian Maier-Aichen's unheimlich adjusted landscape photos. And Wangechi Mutu's paper collages are more like Max Ernst than Chris Ofili (though Ofili is the obvious first correspondance visually).
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Bertold Brecht, Questions from a Worker Who Reads, 1935:
Who built Thebes of the Seven Gates?
In the books stand the names of kings.
Did they then drag up the rock slabs?
And Babylon, so often destroyed,
Who kept rebuilding it?
In which houses did the builders live
In gold-glittering Lima?
Where did the bricklayers go
The evening the Great Wall of China was finished?
Great Rome is full of triumphal arches.
Over whom did the Caesars triumph?
Were there only palaces for the inhabitants of much-sung Byzantium?
Even in legendary Atlantis
Didn't the drowning shout for their slaves
As the ocean engulfed it?The young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Without even a cook?Phillip of Spain wept when his fleet went down.
Did no one weep besides?
Frederick the Great won the Seven Years War.
Who won it with him?A victory on every page.
Who cooked the victory feast?
A great man every ten years.
Who paid the costs?So many reports,
So many questions.
I love that second stanza. There are varying translations, and this one seems to be most often cited, but I prefer the one above.
There's a hint of Eliot's Wasteland ("Unreal City/ Under the brown fog of a winter dawn/ A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many") in this poem. David Markson mentions Brecht's death in This Is Not a Novel - I wonder if he took anything stylistically from Brecht's call and response rhythm.
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Three brief notes from Danny Hillis's excellent Sep 2004 Long Now seminar, Progress on the 10,000-year Clock, which, in my own sorry version of Long Now thinking, I have only just got to.
1. Planning ahead.
I think of the oak beams in the ceiling of College Hall at New College, Oxford. Last century, when the beams needed replacing, carpenters used oak trees that had been planted in 1386 when the dining hall was first built. The 14th-century builder had planted the trees in anticipation of the time, hundreds of years in the future, when the beams would need replacing. Did the carpenters plant new trees to replace the beams again a few hundred years from now?
And, sadly, this story might not be true, though that it is plausible still serves his purpose of getting us thinking about long term thinking.
2. Some principles of experience design.
Hillis offered some principles for good experience and ritual design (with a wedding metaphor):
3. Long run strategies for preservation of something:
He says that the former sometimes leads to the latter (which is strange. Perhaps because ubiquity-through-repetition incurs a Benjaminian loss of aura, making the reproduction something meaningless or opaque).
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