Artwatch UK

Posts tagged “Art and Life

L. O. L. It’s Peeping Tom Time at the National Gallery!

18th July 2012

A little over a decade ago we were requested to move away from Titian’s “Bacchus and Ariadne” by a member of the National Gallery’s education department who was about to give a talk. Her narrative thrust on this great canvas (which had been glued by restorers on to a sheet of “Sundeala” board) proved more sociological than artistic or art historical. It had a villain – the original patron – who, the audience learned, had been a rich dirty old man who supplied extravagantly expensive pigments for an ostentatiously sexy depiction of a victim – an abused mythical woman – who would provide literary cover for his private delectation within his own apartment.

If the Gallery had then hit a low with such travestying philistine cant, we now find that in its drive to increase visitor numbers and extend social constituencies, it has jettisoned the very distinction between Art and Life. Pictures acquired at immense expense in the name of the Public Good are no longer treated as self-sufficient imaginatively crafted works that merit reciprocally reflective attention from the viewer but as pretexts for real-life events of a titillating, humanly exploitative and degrading nature.

Thus, in the bureaucratised stew that is the Cultural Olympiad’s London 2012 Festival, the National Gallery has permitted Titian’s great poesies to serve as springboards to three “edgy” artists. In 2001, in a drawing for Jackdaw (see Fig. 4), we had already marked one of this triumverate, Mark Wallinger, as a clown ripe for elevation to the National Gallery Pantheon, and today, with few honourable exceptions, the newspaper art critics have duly fawned over his efforts:

Inspired by the voyeurism that Ovid loved to describe, Wallinger has created a live peep show featuring a naked woman taking a shower. Locked away in a black wooden box, the showering woman can be spied upon, in the round, through four openings…”, said Waldemar Januszczak, in The Sunday Times.
Where Januszczak (who recently attacked the restoration of Titian’s “Bacchus and Ariadne”) aptly dismissed Wallenger’s degrading stunt as “exhibition bait to draw the crowds” and likened it to “those ads you see in lads’ mags that use naked girls to sell a car”, in the Times, Rachel Campbell-Johnston saw Wallinger’s wheeze as “atmospheric”.
Ben Luke, in the Evening Standard, takes Wallinger as a spell-casting magician:
Wallinger casts us as Actaeon, the voyeur.”
In the Financial Times, Jackie Wullschlager had “laughed out loud”, noting that “In a typical piece of Wallinger democratic wit”, the artist had “advertised for performers called Diana to pose naked, reclining in a bath, washing, looking in a mirror; each does so in turn for two hours.” Like Luke, Wullschlager thrills at the artist’s magically manipulative powers: “We, like Actaeon, are peeping Toms arrived at an unfamiliar place…We queue to gawp, not knowing what to expect, and are ridiculed as voyeurs”.

We are so cast only if we choose to play the chump-role that is offered as a legitimately “performative” (to use Sir Nicholas Serota’s term-of-the-moment) contribution to art. We do not have to do so. We do not have to be complicit with museum educators’ perverse cultural de-constructions. Rather, we might ask them why they do not consider this particular use of real people – women hired-in for the duration – to be a form of “sexploitation”. We might also ask them, as public educators, to explain the connection that they believe Wallinger’s stunt has with Ovid’s stories and Titian’s depictions of them. Even if Wallinger cannot see that Acteon was the very opposite of a voyeur – a man who had had the great misfortune accidentally to intrude upon a bathing goddess – might we not ask why no one at the National Gallery felt able to disabuse him.

Michael Daley

Ruined Renoirs

Our examination of the fate of more than twenty Clark Art Institute Renoirs now showing at the Royal Academy will follow in the next post.

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Above, Fig. 1: Left, Titian’s “Diana and Actaeon”, as currently on display at the National Gallery (Detail, photograph by Bethany Clarke/Getty Images); right, the same painting in 1993 before its second restoration at the National Galleries of Scotland.
Above, Fig. 2: Press coverage in the Daily Mail (July 16th 2012) of the responses to the National Gallery’s offer to gawp for free at naked women bathing.
Above, Fig. 3: A National Gallery invitation to the Credit Suisse-sponsored naked women bathing event which reads:
“Start your weekend with an evening experience at the National Gallery. With live music, a pop-up bar, Lates guided tours and special Metamorphosis: Titian 2012 events, the National Gallery is the perfect place to meet and make friends or lose yourself in the collection.”
Above, Fig. 4: The author’s depiction of Mark Wallinger.
Below, Fig. 5: Quentin Lett’s coverage (Daily Mail, 14th July 2012) of our 11 July post “Stone-washed Renoirs and the Shock of the Undone”.
Click on the images above for larger versions. NOTE: zooming requires the Adobe Flash Plug-in.


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