Wilhelm Sasnal: Whatever

Even though he’s only a few years younger than myself, you’ll often see Wilhelm Sasnal referred to as a “young Polish artist.” Is this a media concern that unless someone is referred to as ‘young’ then no-one will give them a second glance? Does the work itself not have sufficient clout that it has to be backed up by something – anything – that will give it legitimacy? I think this says more about the Tescoization of the art world than about Sasnal himself, whose body of work is an interesting contribution to any understanding of the end times in which we now toil.

Sasnal was born in 1972 in Tarnow, Poland, the town in which he still lives with his family. His impact upon contemporary painting has been inversely proportionate to the modesty of his means. The ‘studio’ in which he works is a one-bedroom flat within a residential block on the outskirts of Krakow. Directly opposite is another block in which he lives with his wife and children. No paint-spattered industrial warehouse space. No skate ramp. No mixing decks or ‘chill zone’ for when his mates come around. Just a man and his work. As Sasnal puts it: “I never believed in excuses such as “I can’t paint because I don’t have a studio.” No, this is only an excuse. I think the point is that you must also adjust to the circumstances of the space you have.”

He came to painting through music. Metal, punk, new wave – Slayer, Sonic Youth, Jesus & Mary Chain. As an art student at the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts, that influence was in direct conflict with what his teachers were trying to foist upon him. “They wanted to teach big ideas, big words like truth and faith, which aren’t necessarily important for a young man.” He left art school in 1999, disillusioned with painting. The crushing burden of art history was too much to bear, so he went into advertising for a few years, but lost his job around the time his first child was born and retreated back to his homw town and all that was familiar – and that meant painting.

He painted a response to the world around him, both physical reality and its black mirror-image as reflected through the mass media. It was only after this withdrawal – to a town with “no culture, no art scene” – that his work began to gain attention and acclaim. He’s now produced a sufficient body of work to have pieces in the Pompidou, the MoMA and the Tate, and was the subject of a major retorspective at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

Being east European, the spectre of World War Two and the Holocaust was always going to be lurking. His great-grandmother died at Auschwitz and other family members were shipped to Germany as forced labour. That sense of history informs all of his work, and only fails when he approaches it directly, such as his referencing of panels from Art Speigelman’s Maus. You can say much more about what happened with an empty snow-covered field than you can with this, for example:

I do like most of his work though, and see its analogue in the writing of Michel Houllebecq. Social anomie, pyschic deadness, Ballard’s ‘death of affect’ – it’s all in there, as is that same essence of simmering malice you see in fashion photography and ‘reality TV’. The depicter, too desenstitised to feel anything like empathy, contempt or even hatred for their subject, is reduced to a kind of anaesthetised voyeurism, waiting for the meteor strike, the terrorist attack or the advert break. Whichever comes first, it doesn’t really matter.

An Infinite Appetite For Distractions

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not forsee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies — the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.
Aldous Huxley, Propaganda in a Democratic Society

What We Don’t Need

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don’t need to have.
Andy Warhol

Malice Aforethought

Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Nick Diamos

John Myers: Middle England

Ikon Gallery is currently hosting the first major exhibition by photographer John Myers. Highly recommended to fans of George Shaw, the exhibition includes portraits of Midlanders taken between 1972-1979, revealing the very people missing from George’s landscapes.

Myers was the senior lecturer in Fine Art at Stourbridge College, and his photography was a reaction to the explosion of interest in the medium during the 1970′s. This was the decade when Robert Frank’s The Americans really made it’s impact, along with the work of Diane Arbus and others. It was also the time when Ansel Adams and his ilk were revered, but Myers noted that for lack of a dramatic backdrop like Yosemite he was going to have to work with what he had.

“You’ve got to come to terms with the place that you live in,” he says, and that meant engaging with the kind of landscape that most of us recognise. A landscape of car parks, building sites, shop windows and substations. A place that, as George Shaw observes, is “a little bit crap” but it’s really all we’ve got, and through the eye of someone like him or John Myers we see its potential renewed.

His series of substation photographs for example – they’re like tourist photographs of Mayan ruins, albeit tourists from the far future, who would look upon the remains of these buildings and wonder just what they were used for.

The collection shows us a world that is almost gone. Clothes and interior decorations alter with the fashions, but what’s also changed is the sense of space, a scape in which things might happen. I could be romanticising the past here – which would be nothing new – but in the era documented by Meyers’ photographs there was still some sense of a future. Now it seems like there’s no future, just an endlessly-sustained present in which we use phbotographs like these to remind us of that indefinable something that has been lost forever.

Middle England is on until the 5th February.

You Couldn’t Make It Up

Some men are alive simply because it is against the law to kill them.
Ed Howe

Who Cares?

This is my problem with Tracey Emin; who fucking cares?
Brian Eno

Somebody Else’s Happiness

I can sympathize with people’s pains but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.
Aldous Huxley

Adrian Ghenie: Loaded Shadow

Adrian Ghenie is the “Transylvanian rising star” of contemporary painting. His CV is a wet dream for the galleries – raised under the shadow of the Ceaucescu regime in an atmosphere of East European industrial edginess, he moved to Berlin, a city that has long been associated with decadent cool.  Cheap rents after the wall came down brought a new influx of artists, dreamers and work-shy hippies, drawn like moths to the fading myth of Iggy, Bowie and Lou. Now relocated to London – another sump for ruined (and ruinous) dreams – he works at exorcising the ghosts of Europe.

Goering, Lenin, Hitler – he’s done ‘em all. Not to mention Duchamp. One of his paintings declared that ‘Dada Is Dead’, but he maintains that painting isn’t. “The ongoing debate about the “death of painting” may be intellectually stimulating, but I think it is also anachronistic. There is enough evidence to conclude that painting is not dead.”

Ceaucescu is though. They even dug up his body to prove it, and Ghenie painted it how he imagined it might now appear, decades later, the flesh sloughed away, the bones slippery to the touch, the evil they hosted now vaporized.

His explanations for his ideas and working methods are also ideally suited to today’s art scene, where outre’ techniques and approaches are a pre-requisite to gaining attention. Paints mixed on garden trowels and applied with a house decorator’s brush; comparing working on the canvas with directing a film, referencing Hitchcock and Lynch… he’s got it all sorted.

Not that I think he needs to resort to such tactics – as so many artists do – to divert attention from any failure in the work. His paintings are shadows loaded with centuries of east European darkness. They speak for themselves and they should be left to do so.

Death To False Metal

I don’t get many emails in relation to this blog. But this one really stood out:

When I hear metal most of it is about death, or related to death.
Do people like death or something?
These songs are just depressing and foreseeing death and grief in life. Sure sometimes if everything in our life is just going down, but why go looking for it? Even if it relates, I don’t jump to death as a conclusion.
Also in my opinion, metal artists are generally ugly, all dressed in black, sad color, really tight pants, making you look gay/depressed.