POLEMICALLY
SMALL
Curated by Edward
Lucie-Smith
Brandon Ballengée, Felipe
Cardena, Genia Chef, Billy Childish, Roni Feldman, Luke Jackson, Sam Jackson,
Michael Leonard, Robert Luzar, Alex Gene Morrison, Gavin Nolan, Claire
Pestaille, Tom Phillips, Benjamin Senior, Dominic Shepherd, John Stark, Oleg
Tolstoy, Gavin Tremlett, Covadonga Valdes, Cedric Wentworth, Alexander
Zackharov
Private View | First
Thursday
Thursday October 7th
6.30pm–8.30pm
Exhibition
Dates
Friday October 8th – Saturday October 30th
2010
Gallery Hours
Wednesday–Saturday 11am–6pm
or by
appointment
Address
336 Old St, London, EC1V
9DR
Contact
+44 (0)20 7739 4055
direct@charliesmithlondon.com
www.charliesmithlondon.com
What’s the polemic? Why
small? This exhibition, of small, sometimes very small, works of contemporary
art is essentially a rant about the outmoded rhetoric of size that is still
embraced by what likes to call itself the avant-garde. New cutting-edge artists
have been painting small now for some time. It’s happening here in London;
it’s happening in Germany, still the real centre for avant-garde activity in
Europe; it is happening among a certain number of Italian artists. It may be
happening elsewhere as well. The interest in small-scale art is inevitably
starting to spread to other genres – sculpture, photography and
video.
Huge art, in Modernist
terms, was essentially an invention of America in the 1940s. Very big Abstract
Expressionist paintings were the “barbaric yawp” (to quote Walt Whitman)
that proclaimed the new cultural dominance of the United States. Before that the
important Modernist painters had only occasionally painted on a very big scale,
to suit a special occasion. Picasso’s Guernica is a good
example.
Big abstract paintings made
themselves at home in the lofts of South-of-Houston-Street New York, then being
colonized by artists. These originally industrial spaces seemed to offer plenty
of wall. Love it, live with it, if necessary trash it. New art, though big, was
still cheap. Later, with the multiplication of new museums in America and
elsewhere, big paintings seemed to have a logical purpose. Admiring critics
wrote pieces about the way in which these overweening canvases offered a new
experience in wraparound vision. Inevitably, however, the space available soon
started to run out. How many Pollocks, de Koonings and Rothkos does it take to
fill a vast gallery space to the point of bursting? Too many painters were
producing big canvases, with the result that a lot of contemporary art, even art
safely in the possession of museums, now spends most of its time in store. Where
ambitious private collectors are concerned, we have become used to the term
‘warehouse art’. The proud possessors are known to own it. It’s also known
that they don’t live with most of it. In a real sense, art that isn’t being
looked at doesn’t exist. Warehouse art is non-art. An awful lot of ambitious
but misguided artists are still producing
it.
If we look at the art of the
past, art earlier than Modernism, we find a mixture of big art and small art.
The big art was almost invariably produced for absolutely specific purposes –
never on spec. It adorned churches and palaces. It offered a focal point to a
public square. Small scale art was sometimes produced without a patron in mind,
simply for the market, as most art is produced today. Many of the great
masterpieces of the past are disconcertingly small. Portraits by Van Eyck and
Memling. Religious paintings by Antonello da Messina. Some, though not all, of
Rembrandt’s self-portraits. Samuel Palmer’s landscapes of the Shoreham
period. Even the Mona Lisa. They need to be looked at in a different way from
wraparound art – slower, more contemplative – dare one say it? – more
loving.
Today many young artists are
forced, through economic necessity, to work in very small spaces. Collectors,
even when prosperous, don’t have unlimited wall space. How many wraparound
canvases can you house in a two-bedroom flat? There is an obvious disjuncture
between what is being made and its supposed destination. An art market that
produces solely for museums and warehouses surely isn’t in a healthy
condition.
This exhibition is meant to
do two rather ambitious things within a physically small space. First, to
suggest that contemporary art is changing, and changing rather faster than
usual. An important part of this change is the rebellion against huge size.
Artists are making small work not because they are forced to (though in some
cases that is increasingly true), but because they actually want to – because
small art, in current conditions, is actually cutting edge, and delivers a new
and dissident message. “Look at me in a different way,” it says. Secondly,
linked to this, the show invites visitors to explore, on their own terms, how
this different way of looking functions, and what it may possibly
deliver.
Edward
Lucie-Smith