Sunday, March 23, 2008

On Peter Doig

Outside the Peter Doig exhibition at Tate Britain, a video shows the artist talking about the show. People crowd round the screen, but some of the words are difficult to hear because of a booming sound coming from a nearby darkened room. I go into the dark room to discover it's a video installation. One of the grumpy old ladies who was plainly having trouble hearing Doig buttonholes an attendant - 'What is this?' 'It's a work of art.' 'But we can't hear anything.'  I suspect a lot of people are like that lady, they like Doig but they don't like contemporary art. On the other hand, he is also embraced by the mandarins of the art world. His White Canoe sold for $10 million and the critics I have read have been, at worst, indulgent, at best ecstatic. His paintings are, unquestionably lovely things. You see them, you like them. The next moment, you'll be picking up the references - the religious iconography, Picasso, van Gogh, any number of impressionists and, perhaps pre-eminently, Gaugin. There's also various movies including Blade Runner, this being one that nobody else seems to have noticed. In short, the moment you walk into the show, you are seduced by the paintings. I was particularly taken with some paintings of a Le Corbusier building seen through trees. But then, I realised, these would have worked better as photographs. This led to the further realisation that I was completely unengaged by any the paintings, that it was all just being laid out in front of me, the elements of a certain kind of art but not art. Is, I began to wonder, Doig - instantly accessible and artistically aware -  just the painter we need to reassure us that painting is not dead? Or perhaps I was just in a bad mood.

7 comments:

  1. I have little issue with the concept. I have seen many films which are Art, as I'm sure have you. But there is something somehow wrong with this method of show, a bit like paintings in the theater at Epidauros. If there was a cinema designed for this sort of work, a sort of gallery of film, but it might be a tad controversial.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ha! I went to see Doig and came away similarly dissatisfied. Found half a dozen or so of the paintings hugely impressive presences, but surrounded by so much woeful filler material that you wondered if there's really anything much to this guy. Like so many contemptorary artists, I suspect, it's more a lucky strike - a trick that works, i.e. impresses, but is really little more than a hollow gesture embedded in a rich mulch of allusion. On the other hand, when he tries, he does make some very interesting surface textures.

    ReplyDelete
  3. There are also far too many of them. In this case, more means less. The big Baselitz show revealed similar weaknesses (a slump in mod career) but overall the life's work was incredibly impressive. There is something insipid about Doig, like a description of someone else's dreams.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Bleedin noise! I was trying to contemplate a majestic Bacon triptych with one of Sam Taylor-Wood's mere student pieces wanking away in the background. Art funhouse! Stick the laughing clown from Blackpool's Pleasure Beach in the middle of it all: Nicholas Serota, embalmed, automated and triumphant in death!

    ReplyDelete
  5. A perfect summing up of Doig, Captain. Trouble is I can see his stuff carrying on fetching jawdropping prices for decades to come - it's got that (unacknowledged) middlebrow appeal that keeps such bubbles somehow intact. Like the ludcirously overpriced French impressionists - or indeed the respectably repellent Bacon and Freud.

    ReplyDelete
  6. The comments are mostly clever bile.

    The original poster wrote that the pictures of the Corbosier apartment block would have worked better as photographs!! But, dear chap, they would have just been photos! If you knew Doig's work/catalogues you would know the photos as source material and would have seen that they are just that - source material.

    ReplyDelete