Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Dengl 20 Tymobyl Cwm?

The Tate Modern has opened an exhibition of the work of Cy Twombly (in calling up the website, my google page wanted to be sure I wasnt really after Wombling) - no - but CyTwombly certainly presents a challenge to anagrammers - I failed on my own to make anything coherent in English, and the first website I went to also failed, even with dropping one, or even two - or is that three - of the letters in his improbable name*. Maybe it is not his real name but was born as a handful of pasta letters he took out of a packet and artfully threw them on a glue-based surface ...
coincidentally, I have just received a copy of Kings Parade, a six monthly periodical designed to make me feel good about (and cough up a legacy in my will to) my old college; and that prints a charming picture of Frances Morris who graduated in 1978 in Art History. She is quoted as saying of herself that she was "a rather strident and opinionated person who smoked a pipe and wore women's land army breeches". Many of us change our ways after undergraduatehood, and(?)/but(?) Morris is now "Curator of Tate Modern where, as Head of Collections, International Art, she is in charge of acquisitions for the collection of modern and contemporary art from all over the world".
*might (Pseudo)Welsh accept something like: Tymobly Cwm ?

the Evening Standard gave the assembly a five star mark:

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/artexhibition-20646808-details/Cy+Twombly:+Cycles+&+Seasons/artexhibitionReview.do?reviewId=23496933

the spectator, also offered a lot of praise from its art critic

http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/arts/797131/traces-of-self.thtml

yet the Spectator chose to follow its eulogy of twombly with an article from someone who writes seldom, as he is a sculptor who expresses himself that way. Alexander Stoddart has made a much larger than life statue of Adam Smith, unveiled on Independence Day in Edinburgh's High Street.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/arts/797141/how-the-west-was-won.thtml

Stoddart is uncharacteristically articulate and choate for a visual artist. We can see exactly what he represents in his monument to Adam Smith. I can see exactly what he says in his reflections on what he calls modernism, in various arts (I think there might be some challenge to those he includes, whom others might like to categorise as postModern .... - but that's a minor matter, alongside the very cogent and serious case Stoddart makes).

In a crucial paragraph he puts it this way:

The Left, early in the last century, failed to secure direct revolution in the West, so another tactic was adopted — to dismantle the institutions of the Occident in a long, piecemeal slog. The focus fell on the arts, and this explains why the high music and visual arts of today are so startlingly different from anything you might encounter in undeconstructed times. Where the family, say, was singled out as a sinister and coercive societal institution, so certain artistic forms likewise became suspect: the tune; the rhyme; the moulding; the plinth. Today they are half-heartedly trying to reconstruct the family; but the cultural institutions are proving harder to patch up and this can be attributed to something in the artistic forms of traditionalism that the newly barbarised human being deeply dreads. The Modernism of the last century has forged a sub-sensibility, where man is engineered to be a healthy kind of ignoramus — a Superman — unneedful of the analgesic mercies that art of the old sort delivered into the veins of suffering humanity. The pain is the gain — so let’s write poems that are merely chopped prose, boil our testicles to win the Turner prize, build houses that look like washing machines for living in and, if we make statues at all, make sure they are bolted down at pavement level, so we can ‘interact’ with them (usually with some vomit on a Saturday night).

We may expect a lot of people to have been bruised by him, and to hit back. I'm with Stoddart. Good for him and his work and good for the case he has spoken out.