Damien Hirst at Tate Modern

I have been for a long time as convinced as I am of anything that Damien Hirst's art is a fraud. I have no idea about his sincerity, I don't know him. But I do know his work, and I've just come out from the first major exhibition of it ever in a world-class museum, the Tate Modern. There were various rumours in the art press about how important his collectors thought a major retrospective would be for the value of their collections, I mean, for the artist's reputation, so we should be able to take this as the best of his work.

What did we get? Medicine cabinets, animal and fish vitrines, pills in glittering showcases, spot paintings, three big spin paintings, some medical equipment cabinets, cigarette butts, and the butterfly room. I'll come back to the Real Live Butterfly room later. All these works were produced by assistants in workshops all over the world - though he closed a lot of them in 2008/9. I'm guessing White Cube still has all the unsold Hirst paintings a gallery could ever not want. Heaven alone knows what the notional value of it all was: £100m at the height of the boom, maybe £20m-£30m now? Of course, that's one reason the collectors needed the Tate's endorsement.

You need to know where I'm coming from. I can spot a Pollock that works from one that doesn't, and the same for Barnett Newman. I have a blind spot for Cy Twombley, but on Tuesdays I feel it's my fault, and I'm quite happy for Manzoni to can his shit and exhibit the cans. I thought Spiral Jetty was amazing when I first learned about it sometime in my late teens. I could happily have a Crevelli and a Boldini and a Rothko on my walls - if I had walls strong enough and large enough and if someone were to be so generous. I know that a work or an artist can be the real thing and yet I don't like it, which is how I feel about Basquiat's work. The real thing in art is as subtle, mysterious and utterly present as it is in acting, or politics or cooking. You know when a meal has been slapped together and when, however simple, it has been made with love. Knowing this is not genetic, it's not "evolutionary", it is "cultural knowledge" (but that's the point) that takes reading, looking, learning and practice, and one thing I'm saying is that if you put in the work, you will agree with me, or at least understand why I have this opinion.

I walked through Hirst's exhibition and wondered how on earth anyone could buy it - not just the work, but the whole act. My art detector remained resolutely silent. There's no point explaining why I think Hirst's art is fraudulent. If I say "it lacks X" the rules of modern art-babble allow the reply "Well, that's the point, it's interrogating the idea that art should be X". Hirst's art is supposed to be as much conceptual as representative and physical, but these are ideas you wouldn't bother to have, rather than ideas that, having seen them, you wish you had had. Medicines in cabinets might work if there was some subject linking the medicines together - but there isn't. It's just a collage of boxes. One instance of an idea is conceptual art, a hundred are just a production-line commodity.

The only thing that ever gave me pause about Hirst was the fact that Saatchi backed him. Now I think that Saatchi saw in the young Hirst a good self-publicist, networker and organiser, someone who could (have others) turn out easily-identifiable pseudo-art works for the ordinary millionaire with no actual understanding of or feeling for art. Saatchi backed Hirst as a business proposition, not as an artist. Hirst's is art for people who don't get art, in the same way that Jane Campion's films are movies for people who don't go to the movies. Buy a Hirst, put it in your boardroom, foyer or lounge, spout the art-babble the gallery gave you, and all your friends and visitors will have to assume you are therefore smarter and hipper than them, because you get it, and they don't.

Artists have sub-contracted parts of their work to technicians before and will do so forever: you don't really think that Hals, Rembrant and all those guys painted those ruff collars? There were craftsmen who specialised in it, as there were specialists in painting rugs, curtains and voluminous clothing - they were called "tapestrymen". There's nothing wrong with sending the routine stuff out to a tapestryman - just as there's nothing wrong with a novelist letting their editor give the first draft a good going-over - but an artist can't send out the whole thing. Then they are a designer or an architect. A lot of the work of certain of the big names feels to me as if they really were out of the room when it was done and shipped. These are exactly the artists Banksy is parodying with the Mr Brain Wash thing. Warhol was always on the Art side of the line, Koons can be either side, Hirst is always on the design side. A Warhol has that extra something we need art to have, but a Hirst doesn't have that magic, it's soul-less. Art without soul is usually just bad design.

He even manages to strip the soul and magic out of exotic South American butterflies. The idea of a room full of fancy butterflies doing whatever they do isn't a new one, though keeping the whiteboards on which their pupae were stuck might be. A proper interior designer would have somehow recognised and reflected the exoticism of the butterflies in the colour of the walls, the floorboards and the furniture, while the mechanisms of heating and steaming would have been rendered invisible. It would be a room for rich people to sit in, perhaps to lightly sauna in, and enjoy the sight of the butterflies. So it was difficult to see the point of the peice: was it about the birth-life-death cycle of these wonderful creatures? Was it about their presence? Who knows? When one of the butterflies landed on one of the children in the room, it should have somehow made them part of the artwork. But it didn't, it just made them a kid with a butterfly on their shirt.

London East and West

Random stuff that fell into my iPhone camera over the last couple of weeks.

The Broadgate Tower at the end of Bishopsgate - lots of it unoccupied; the Heron Tower at the other end of Bishopsgate, near Liverpool Street; beef salad at The Book Club; fancy hash at The Diner; Cowboy in a parking off Curtain Road, the Street Art tours stop at this one; I don't know what it is, but it's on the corner of Mundy Street and Hoxton Square and my sister likes it; I have been trying to get the sense of how that crane looms for a while now, and think this does it; looking eastbound on South Kensington District Line when London had its summer heatwave week; finally, are there enough notices and signs on that pole halfway up the Archway? And check the top one out: 687 yards? Really? Exactly?

French Protestant Church, Soho Square

So the Friday of the Opening Ceremony (man am I glad I don't have a TV and so didn't spend three hours watching a tacky tribute to every false myth about Britain there is), I was passing through Soho Square when I noticed that the door to the French Church was open. It's never open.

They were opening for the Olympics and the public could go in and walk around. It's very simple, yet very beautiful and restful in an understated and subtle way. The church was set up for the Huguenots when they sought refuge in England and were granted it by Edward the Sixth. I love the simple, soft and warm brickwork. Standing inside it, I felt calm and safe and yet also lifted by the decor. I prefer it to the more gaudy Catholic church off Leicester Square.

 

The Spiritual Collapse

The Spiritual Collapse is when someone who you know to be smart, intelligent, well-read and generally understanding of the way the world works, suddenly gets religion, or starts going to healers, and talking about mystic energies, ancient wisdom and quantum mechanics. In the same sentence. One of the smartest and most beautiful women I've known Went Spiritual sometime in her late thirties. So did the scientist Candace Pert, whose book prompted me to think about this. 

I'm not going to reprise Ms Pert's story, as you can read it here, and you should also read her book, Molecules of Emotion, which is as honest and candid a piece of science autobiography as has been published. The point is, she was a smart young woman who turned Spiritual and started talking about "wonderful healers" and weird therapies. 

Now, generally I'd say "if it helps you get through the day, it's okay with me". But there's something about the whole Spiritual^TM thing I don't trust. You don't see many poor people doing it. It's very upper-middle class and it ain't cheap. Religion, like AA and the NHS, tends to be free at the point of need. There's an air of smugness about it: Spirituals get it and the rest of us don't. I've never seen a Spiritual go in for competitive sports or serious gym work. They do Yoga, of course, and those who do it every day with some application get very fit and toned. The result usually isn't sensual, and it isn't very sexy either. I get the sense that they are keeping up a front: reserved, standing very straight, with straight, shoulder-length blonde hair tucked behind their ears, speaking evenly. Sexlessly easy-on-the-eye. (The brunettes tend to be funkier and can't quite do the semi-detached presence of the blondes.)

Add in the various "spiritual" exercises, plants, smells, scents, foods, retreats and don'ts (no sugar, no coffee, no fats, no whatever the Government are panicking about and nothing that you'd see an honest builder eating), plus the fact that I've never run across anyone Spiritual who can cut code or has read Karl Popper, and my alarm bells start to go off. I get the sense of denial decorated with elaborate ritual. I'm not sure I really trust anyone who doesn't drink coffee.

If you're okay, you don't need a steady supply of healing this, spiritual that and nice-smelling the other. (I'm okay with nice scents and a clean house, but that has nothing to do with Spirituality: it's called "having a nice place to live". It's when the claims about the spiritual powers of this or that scent start up I head for the exit.) It's not the same as physical exercise.

I exercise because if I don't, the result will be fat, and high blood sugar, and tight trousers, and being short of breath when I tie my shoelaces because my stomach is pushing up against my lungs. Exercise is something the body needs to hold back the rot and decay. I'm happy with the idea that the soul, like the body, gets weary, and needs whatever it takes to perk back up again. There's a wide range of exercise regimes, and people suit some more than others. I've no doubt there's a wide range of soul-perking-up regimes as well, and what suits me won't work for you. The Spirituals always push the same stuff (or rather, this month's same stuff) for everyone. You will never hear a Spiritual suggest that perhaps what you need is an afternoon with the Marx Brothers, a game of soccer with the lads or an afternoon's retail therapy, nor, God forbid, that what you really need is to get laid.

Moving on to stopping the soul-rot, I'm not sure a soul rots from the outside - provided it stays away from hard drugs, bullies and assholes, reality TV, blockbuster fiction and Hollywood comedies. That being not too difficult (except the bullies and assholes part, depending on where you work) souls tend to rot from the inside. Some of that is from toxic stuff other people put there, and that's what therapy is for. Some of it is from toxic stuff that you put there yourself. That's what alcoholics and addicts deal with when they do those famous Twelve Steps. Both approaches require honesty, willingness, open-ness, and the courage to face some unpleasant truths about yourself and other people, and about things you did and others did to you.

Spirituals are all about emptying the mind, letting vexations blow through, not acting on emotions but recognising them so you can let them go, being in the moment and not dwelling on the past. You will notice this is almost the identical advice business writers give you about being made redundant: don't take it personally, let the feelings go, move on, see the opportunity... anything but start to organise some form of political protest. The Indian and Far Eastern traditions out of which Spiritual^TM comes have a teaching of the powerlessness of the individual in the face of politics, warlords and weather. Which is very convenient for the politicians, warlords, and given the cultures, the families as well. No revolt, just acceptance. It doesn't really travel very well, and in Europe, it becomes rather self-centered, smug and solipsist: we don't need to organise, because we have enough money and connections to be Spiritual^TM and ignore our mis-treatment by clueless governments and lying businesses. 

So what drives an otherwise sensible Western European to smug solipsism, month-long retreats to India and frequent consultations with healers and fringe therapists? In a word: denial. A clear conscience stays clear: it doesn't need endless polishing. Something went seriously wrong with these people's lives or self-images and they can't or won't face it and deal with it. Alkies and addicts have no choice but to deal as the cost of not doing so is premature death, and not a good one either. Spiritual^TM folk don't have the same pressure to get real.

In Ms Pert's case, it's the Lasker / Nobel episode. Refusing to sign off on a nomination for a Nobel prize is not girlish pique, as she presents it, but incredibly selfish and spiteful. No matter how justified she feels in her pique. Any AA sponsor would tell her to apologise to all three of the men she prevented from getting a Nobel. Instead she wrote a letter to one of the "forgiving" him for cutting her out of the awards. Way to get it wrong there.

Isn't spirituality often a reaction to horror, pain, desperation, despair and other such? Well, I talk about Higher Powers and say the Serenity Prayer, and I've been emotional places that would scared most people. But I'm not Spiritual^TM. I believe that I'm not given anything I can't handle in sobriety, and that God didn't save me from drowning to kick me to death on the beach. If you want to call those spiritual beliefs, we can agree to differ. I do know this: of the people I see in the rooms, the more troubled they are, the more they talk about spirituality. Healthy alkies with lives aim to be sober, not saints. Spirituals have been nowhere near Hell, but they do live in Denial, twinned with towns the same name all over the world, and the weight of that denial is what caused their collapse.

Around The South Bank Summer 2012

Back in the grey concrete wasteland that was my youth in the 19.. never-you-minds, the South Bank centre was a grey concrete wasteland. The Festival Hall had one tired attempt at a cafe in the basement, and they gave up on that. No matter what the weather was elsewhere, on the South Bank it was always wind-swept and with puddles. Then something happened and it got re-developed in the late 1990's. It looks like this now. The only thing that hasn't changed is the bit where it has puddles.

I know you take this for granted. You aren't old enough to remember when the place was a wasteland and people sincerely wished for it to be demolished and re-built. The Good Old Days are now. But then, they always were.

Pina Bausch at Sadlers Wells - Summer 2012

I saw Palermo, Palermo and Como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si at Sadlers Wells in the early summer, two of the Ten Cities ballets Pina Bausch devised towards the end of her career. I've seen the Wim Wenders movie Pina, and the documentary Dancing Dreams, about a group of teenager rehearsing Kontakthof in the Tantztheatre Wuppertal company. That's the really interesting one.

The Wenders movie doesn't get the experience of watching a Bausch piece live. For one thing, they are long, usually between two and three hours, and sustained, meaning that while there are scenes and dancers come and go, the action doesn't stop, there are no acts - though there is an interval. Then there's the whole presence thiang. Even the scenery has it - critics can't mention her Rite of Spring without mentioning the peat moss, and the breeze block wall that crashes to the stage at the start of Palermo Palermo actually creates the set the dancers have to work with. When the company assembles en masse across the stage, it's a dramatic moment in itself: they are thirty of the most individual dancers anywhere, and I don't know how the women in the audience feel about the male dancers, but I know what I feel about the women: simply ten of the most physically-present and desirable women I've ever seen. With other companies, you're watching a performance, with the Basuch troupe, you're watching an event.

I'm still not quite sure what I saw at Sadlers Wells. I have a feeling that I won't look at classical and contemporary dance again in the same way: it's all going to look a little... uncommitted? stylised? generic? emotionally light-weight? None of those are adjectives you could use to describe flamenco either, but flamenco didn't affect the way I saw other genres. I guess I had a space on the shelves already marked "passionate virtuoso Spanish gypsy dancing" - I just didn't know how good the best are. There's no ready-made space for Pina Bausch's work, so it upsets all the other books on the shelf.

According to the interviews with her dancers, Ms Bausch didn't say a lot, but when she did, it was cryptic and inspiring. Lutz Forster describes how just before the performance after an awful rehearsal, he and Bausch had their ritual exchange, and then she said "Don't forget, you have to scare me." Anna Wehsarg says: "New in the company, I didn't yet grasp how Pina worked. And she didn't explain it. I was lost. Until I realised I had to pull myself up by my own hair." Yet Ms Bausch hired her, and did so because she saw a dancer who had something unique to bring as a performer, and was prepared to give her the time to work out what she needed to do. 

The only other person I can think of who hired performers for what they could bring, and then let them get on with it at their pace, was, of course, Miles Davis. Who also said very little by way of advice, and much of that cryptic. It works if you can spot talent, are prepared to adapt to the strengths and weaknesses of the people you hire, and hire people whose technique fits what you need. It doesn't work if you need three new Swans for the corps de ballet or a couple of second violins to saw away at the pops. It works, in other words, if you are an idiosyncratic artist of some considerable creative ability, unique vision and don't need to control every last detail.

The dancing in Bausch's work is there to convey emotion and story. Swan Lake could as well be staged with technically-competent fourteen year-olds as the Swans, and it probably has. There would be no difference to the impact of the piece. A Bausch piece needs to be done by grown-ups who can bring the emotional weight and presence it needs. This becomes very clear watching the teenagers in Dancing Dreams, when you can see how much of an effort it is for them, not to make the moves, but to create the presence the moves need. Take the time to watch this interview with one of the company's repetiteurs.

Most of the time, the audience is the judge of the performer. If the punters don't laugh, the comic ain't funny. There are a handful of non-mainstream creators who are the measure of an audience: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Eva Yerbabuena, John Cage... to name but a few. Watching Bausch's work made me feel the same way: I had to measure up, to learn how to respond. If you ever get the chance to see a performance by the company, see it. You might not make sense of it immediately, but you will know you've seen something no-one else is even close to attempting and which will change the way you look at ballet.

Under The Arches - South Bank Street Art

The other week I went to see the Jazz Dance performance at the Peacock Theatre. After the first couple of numbers, I was forced to think about the whole idea of saying bad things about stuff that other people like that you don't. Do you make nasty remarks about the audience ("Peacock Theatre audiences arrive at Holborn on westbound trains, or through Charing Cross", or "If the audience at Sadlers Wells is urbane and older, the audience at the Peacock is urban and younger")? Do you say that the dancers lacked grace and ability, and that the choreography was crude? Because my "graceless and stylised" is someone else's "fierce and powerful". So I left at the interval.

This meant I had some time to pass before my train, so I dropped off onto the South Bank, where I haven't been for a while, and saw this lot.

Quite made my evening. I have no idea why these guys do it, and interviews in magazines like VNA just take the activity for granted, but I'm damn glad they do.