Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 235

Girl gangs, scrotums and the Richard Hamilton invasion – the week in art

The father of pop art gets a long-overdue retrospective at Tate Modern, plus robots on the loose in galleries and biker girls from Morocco – all in your fave weekly art roundup

Exhibition of the week

Richard Hamilton
This is an ambitious survey of the great British artist, who died in 2011. Alongside Hamilton's retrospective at Tate Modern, two of his radical installations of the 1950s will be recreated at the ICA and his experiments in printmaking are celebrated at the Alan Cristea Gallery. Does he deserve this fuss? For sure. Hamilton was an outstanding shaper and observer of the modern age. He is best known as the father of pop art, but this was just the beginning. Hamilton remade the works of Marcel Duchamp and helped make this subversive artist famous, as well as creating modern history paintings that are cool, enigmatic and deeply disconcerting – Swingeing London 67 preserves forever the dark side of the 1960s just as his Northern Ireland paintings will always be potent documents of the Troubles. Hamilton is a modern master.
• Tate Modern, London SE1, from 13 February until 26 May.

Other exhibitions this week

Quentin Blake
The man who drew Willy Wonka's chocolate factory and has helped to shape modern British childhood gets a very well-deserved museum show.
• Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge CB2, from 12 February until 12 May.

Hannah Rickards
Landscape is translated by Rickards into descriptions of storms and other natural phenomena as she conceptualises intense experiences of space and time.
• Modern Art Oxford, Oxford OX1, from 15 February until 21 April.

Stanley Spencer
In case you didn't know, it's a century since the first world war started, and this exhibiiton examines how one of Britain's best-loved artists responded to its horrors.
• Pallant House Gallery, Chichester PO19, from 15 February until 15 June.

David Batchelor
This stylish urban colourist pays homage to Brazilian art with his Concretos.
• New Art Centre, Salisbury SP5, from 8 February until 16 March.

Masterpiece of the week

Richard Hamilton – The Citizen, 1981-3
This picture of an IRA hunger striker is one the most uneasily powerful of all modern history paintings. Taking a genre associated with grand 19th-century paintings of battles, Hamilton introduces both eerily religious qualities and a queasy obsession with the lower functions of the body. It is an altarpiece to anger and shit.
• Tate – part of the Hamilton retrospective.

Image of the weekWhat we learned this week

How cool the biker girl gangs of Morocco look

Why Petr Pavlensky nailed his scrotum to Red Square

That the fourth plinth is about to get a giant thumbs up – and a skeletal horse

That robots are about to start roaming Tate Britain ...

... And what it foretells about the galleries of the future

What David Bailey's best portraits are

And what we thought of his new mega-show Stardust – which he curated himself

That you can now head on a magical metal mystery tour in London, courtesy of Richard Deacon

That Richard Hamilton was also a trailblazer in the social networking world

And finally ...

Follow us on Twitter

Share your art of your holidays now to combat the weather

Richard HamiltonPaintingDrawingInstallationArtJonathan Jones
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Welcome to the art galleries of the future

Robots are set to roam Tate Britain. Do they foretell a time of virtual art appreciation and of permanent collections in permanent storage?

What will museums be like 50 years from now? The question is raised by an unprecedented nocturnal invasion of Tate Britain. Artist collective the Workers is to release robots to roam the world's foremost collection of British art at night. Electric eyes will scan the Turners. Digital brains will digest the Hogarths.

The Roastbeef of Old England. Scans as comical. Ha ha.

The future is not easy to predict. Once people thought powdered mash was the future. But the Smash martians were wrong. The earthlings still prefer, given the time, real mashed potatoes. And as George asked in Seinfeld, where are the flying cars? I thought there'd be flying cars by now.

But if robots roaming Tate Britain are piquant, another news item indicates the way cultural life is actually going. A bookless library has opened in San Antonio, Texas, dedicated to e-reading. Will there one day be artless museums too?

We're already on the way there. It's not just that all major museums now make much if not all of their collection visible on websites and apps. The next stage has been available for a long time at – of all places – London's National Gallery.

Here you can sit with a coffee and explore the entire collection on a screen, sitting in a comfy chair. Obviously, it's intended as an aid to understanding the paintings themselves. But it could be taken further.

There could be National Galleries in every town. At each one you would enjoy the shop, the cafe, and a comfortable lounge lined with screens to explore the collection.

What about the actual paintings? Here, Tate has blazed the trail, establishing that a gallery has no responsibility to show all of its collection but can keep much of it in a hi-tech store while showing some in its network of galleries and making more available online. The entire collection could be stowed away in secure vaults in the coming age of the artless gallery.

But there's a better way. Paintings could be divided between the many branches of a national museum on a rotational basis – just as the National Gallery is currently touring its top Manet to regional galleries. So, at the Liverpool branch of the National Gallery, you could see the entire collection digitally then examine some choice painting such as Piero della Francesca's Baptism of Christ, for real, in the "analogue" room.

Christ – my head is spinning. Futurology is freakish when it all seems so possible, when the sci-fi world is already half-here, even if it's not the half with the rocket cars and the moonbases but the robots roaming the Tate.

ArtExhibitionsTate BritainMuseumsHeritageRobotsJonathan Jones
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David Bailey: Stardust – review

National Portrait Gallery, London
Bailey's style is all move, jump, grin, gurn or pout for me, babe. But Stardust's ecstatically brainless glamorama is glib entertainment for those who can't be bothered with real art
• David Bailey's best portraits – in pictures

This is the photographic age. It took more than 150 years, but the camera is now universally accepted as a means of making art. So does that make star photographers the great artists of today?

David Bailey's retrospective Stardust at the National Portrait Gallery is being received exactly that way – as a triumphal exhibition by a master. It is certain to be one of the most popular museum shows of 2014. Bailey is getting (actually has given himself, as curator of the show) the full Lucian Freud treatment as a major modern British portraitist. Double portraits in which he poses with Andy Warhol and Salvador Dalí, not to mention the advertising of his friendship with Damien Hirst, who has designed the poster and catalogue cover, bolster his claim to be no ordinary snapper but one of the visual wizards of our time.

If artistic brilliance were merely the creation of snazzy, glamorous, eye-catching pictures, Bailey would indeed be one of the greats. From the giant blow-up of Michael Caine that fills a high wall of the gallery's entrance space to groovy pics of everyone from the Rolling Stones to Grayson Perry, there's so much talent here, behind and in front of the camera. Bailey gets everyone to act up: there's not a still moment in the show, for his style is up, up, up and move, darling, jump, grin, gurn or pout for me, babe.

It's a good show to have on while the NPG campaigns to buy Anthony van Dyck's magnetic last self-portrait, for Van Dyck bequeathed to the British the "swagger portrait", in which everyone is primped and posed magnificently. Bailey takes that kind of portrait with his camera.

The trouble is, dynamism and colour and vibrancy and really great subjects are not enough to give a picture poignancy, meaning or depth. Bailey is inexhaustibly shallow. His conversations with Hirst must be fantastic. This exhibition goes down as easily as a colour supplement, but has about the same claim to be art.

Stardust's ecstatically brainless glamorama provides glib entertainment for people who can't be bothered with real art. The pictures look like sanitised stills from a film Fellini never made: yes, they're arresting, but a real artist – a Fellini – would want to look behind the facades, not just pimp them up.

The only moving photographs in this entire exhibition are Bailey's black-and-white shots of the East End taken in the early 1960s. Here is the world he came from, scarred and grimed by war and poverty. That reality was soon eclipsed by the vanity of 60s culture and Bailey's photographs have stayed in that bubble of stardust ever since.

If this is mastery, give me incompetence.

Rating: 2/5

David BaileyPhotographyArtNational Portrait GalleryJonathan Jones
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Prince Charles upstages Cameron, from his wooden throne in flooded Somerset | Jonathan Jones

Charles has given a glimpse of what he will be like as king – a mystical repudiation of the metropolitan elite

The king over the water sits on his wooden throne in the watery wastes of the west. On a supportive tour of flooded Somerset, the never yet but perhaps, very soon, future king was photographed on a gnarly rustic seat mounted on the back of a tractor, in an image suggesting everything from a radical production of King Lear to a re-enactment of the life of King Alfred the Great.

Ancient images of British kingship float round Charles as he sits in swampy estate. In the dark ages, King Alfred took refuge in marshy nooks of southwest England as he evaded the Vikings, until in the end he was able to emerge and tame them. That really happened. In myth, the west of England and Wales were the realm of King Arthur who took the sword Excalibur from a pale arm that rose out of waters ever deeper than the ones now bringing misery to Somerset. And then there is King Cnut, ordering the waves to retreat in a wise ruler's demonstration of the limits of power.

If there is a Cnut in this story it is of course David Cameron and not Prince Charles, who has actually gone to Somerset while the prime minster hides and prays for the waters to vanish. It is unfair to mock Charles for offering what solace he can to people whose lives have been turned upside down by flooding. This bizarre photo-opportunity is presumably something he felt he had no choice about. If people went to the effort of putting a nice rustic throne on a trailer for him, how could he refuse it? Well – if he had an eye for the media he might.

Charles in Somerset has given a glimpse of what he will be like as king. In speaking up for a suffering community he has made a real intervention in politics – and a popular one. It is all starting to happen as his friends and enemies foresaw. He will not be a silent constitutional monarch. He will speak out on issues he cares about. If this embarrasses the government, so be it.

In upstaging Cameron and implicitly accusing the state of inaction, he has chosen a very strong popular cause. Everyone has been grouching about the weather for a month now, and here at last is someone with the authority to ask why, oh why, can't the coalition stop the rain.

It may seem as if he is sitting on a garden bench suspended above muddy waters. In reality he is on very strong ground in giving voice to the anger of the flooded. That throne is hewn of the people's rage.

This is more than a picture of a man keeping his feet dry. It is an image of a new kind of kingship – or an old one. With its Arthurian dreaminess, the countrified seat of our ruler in waiting speaks not of modern constitutional arrangements but a return to some hippie notion of the primitive roots of monarchy. Will there be morris dancers at his coronation? And a wicker man for the political class?

In an age that hates professional politicians, there may be real popular enthusiasm for a king who tells the government where to get off. Republicans who have dreamed for decades of a clumsy Charles becoming an unpopular monarch may be sorely disappointed. His canny stand in Somerset could mark the beginning of a powerful mystic repudiation of the bureaucrats and metropolitan elite. Speak for Olde England, Charles!

There's just one problem, for a democracy. Those Cnuts in Westminster are elected. The Prince of the Marsh is not. Somewhere in that mud there's a Monty Python peasant saying "Well I didn't vote for you."

FloodingPrince CharlesMonarchyDavid CameronJonathan Jones
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Richard Hamilton: portrait of the artist as a social networker

Artist Richard Hamilton was snapped by everyone from Cartier-Bresson to Hockney to Jasper Johns. Jonathan Jones on a life in Polaroids

• Gallery: see more Polaroids of Richard Hamilton

The great British modern artist Richard Hamilton could see into the future. In his 1956 collage Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? he saw the consumer society in all its TV ad glory when most Britons were still trudging smoggy streets of postwar austerity. With its framed comic, tinned ham sculpture, television, tape recorder and a bodybuilder clutching a giant lolly labelled POP, Hamilton's ideal home was the manifesto of pop art.

In these pictures, the famous and the gifted return a favour, and portray a man who chronicled the rise of pop culture. John Lennon and Paul McCartney snap the artist who designed The White Album. Bryan Ferry turns the camera on the man who taught him art at Newcastle University. Here, too, are his artistic peers: Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter and Yoko Ono behind the Polaroid camera.

So is this collection a portrait of Richard Hamilton, or of the people he knew? As in Lennon and McCartney's song In My Life, it is both. We are our friendships and loves.

Art has been made since the Romantic age as if the artist were a solitary genius generating ideas from some place deep inside. The most courageous insight of Richard Hamilton was to reject this myth. Long before sharing and interaction became today's cultural buzzwords, he saw that all art is social. So when Francis Bacon took a picture of Hamilton as part of Hamilton's multi-author self-portrait, they were creating a work of art that was neither a Bacon nor a Hamilton but something new.

Here is Richard Hamilton, through his friends' eyes: a social portrait of the artist who foresaw the social age.

Richard HamiltonArtExhibitionsJonathan Jones
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Is David Hockney the greatest living British painter just by default?

We shouldn't tar Hockney with the brush of 'greatness'. His work is more clever and passionate than these deadening labels allow

David Hockney, back in Los Angeles and back to painting portraits after his sojourn in Yorkshire and experiments in open-air landscape painting, has given an interview to the Sunday Times. On the cover of its Culture supplement he was feted as "our greatest living painter". But what is a great painter, and does he fit the bill?

I've recently been wrestling with such questions at Tate Britain. I've fallen in love with this museum – not entirely because of the relaunch of its collection. No, it's the fantastic unevenness of British art, right down the centuries from Tudor times to today, that makes Tate Britain so mesmerising. At the National Gallery you are sure to see great art – practically everything in it is a masterpiece. But at Tate Britain there is no magical barrier that separates diamonds and dross. The next thing you look at might be a work of strange genius, or it might be dull as dishwater.

Where does Hockney fall in the great lucky dip that is British art? His luxuriantly stilled vision of Californian dreams, A Bigger Splash, and his portrait of Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy hang in a gallery that also includes a corruscating painting by Francis Bacon. I have to be honest that, for me, Bacon's gory triptych blasts everything in that room into ordinariness. This includes Hockney.

Obviously that doesn't refute the claim that Hockney is our greatest living painter, as Bacon passed away some time ago. So is the title of greatest living British painter just something you get by default?

The concept of artistic greatness should be used sparingly. A walk around Tate Britain shows that it is possible to be a fine, interesting, worthwhile, accomplished, enduring artist without being great. We really have not produced many greats. But there are loads of British artists who are worth looking at, often. That's very true of "young British art", which produced no great art but loads of striking images and ideas.

When it comes to someone as talented, clever and passionate as David Hockney, why saddle him with this deadening word "greatness"? Since the early 1960s his art has reflected modern life with poetry and wit. In his interview in the Sunday Times he talks about optics and perspective and smoking. All those enthusiasms take him far from the mausoleum of greatness, to somewhere more interesting – the real world, of which he is such an honest painter.

David HockneyFrancis BaconTate BritainPaintingArtJonathan Jones
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The Sellafield shutdown raises the spectre of science as horror | Jonathan Jones

Nuclear power is a myth as much as a reality, a shadow in the modern mind. Behold a place where dark deeds are done

This eerie picture of Sellafield by night shows why it is almost impossible to be rational about nuclear energy. As the nuclear reprocessing plant in north-west England announced a partial shutdown while it investigated a high-radiation reading, our atomic fears once again mushroomed.

There's something unreal about this photograph: it evokes science-fiction images of alien phenomena infiltrating the natural landscape of Cumbria. Behold a place where dark deeds are done deep inside the atom. We've seen the film before, so many times – from cold-war newsreels to 1970s Doctor Who.

Indeed, the iconography of "science as horror" that haunts this photograph is far older than nuclear power itself. This hi-tech nocturne closely resembles Phillipe Jacques de Loutherbourg's 1801 painting Coalbrookdale by Night, which sees one of the great centres of the Industrial Revolution as a hellish workshop whose fires luridly illuminate a ruined countryside.

Ever since the birth of industry 200 years ago, humanity's power to operate on nature has provoked as much revulsion as pride. No dark satanic mills of the 19th century, however, provoked the unique dread this picture illuminates, for nuclear energy breeds nightmares that have arrested its development. Every accident slows down the building of power stations, as the pro-nuclear environmentalist James Lovelock has observed.

There is a case to be made – as Lovelock and other dissident Greens insist – for nuclear power as an alternative to carbon fuels. Whatever the truth or otherwise of that case, the outrage such opinions provoke arguably has an element of the irrational and this picture explains why. Nuclear power is a myth as much as a reality, a shadow in the modern mind. The first images of nuclear reactions that lodged themselves in the world's imagination were mushroom clouds. The first we heard of "splitting the bomb" was news of a slaughter.

This photograph is of nothing more than a spookily lit industrial plant – but it carries a massive weight of terror in which de Loutherbourg's devilish Coalbrookdale merges with Andy Warhol's silkscreen atomic explosion.

If defenders of nuclear energy are right, the gothic imagination that feasts on images such as this prevents us from making rational choices.

As of writing, Sellafield said the high emissions it detected were after all the result of "natural background radiation".

Nuclear powerEnergyEnergy industryScience fiction and fantasyPhotographyJonathan Jones
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Hockney, Disney and a Ford Focus – the week in art

David Hockney's prints speak louder than words, Disney princesses get a porn makeover and Martin Creed makes a car work as if by magic – all in your weekly art dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Richard Deacon
The curling, curving forms of Richard Deacon's sculptures might be seen by some future art historian as analogous with contemporary physics. His free-flowing art could be a mirror of warped spacetime, or even a model of the "superstring" model of the cosmos. Here is a modern beauty that twists and dances its way through nature.
• Tate Britain, London SW1 from 5 February until 27 April

Other exhibitions this week

David Hockney
My favourite prints by David Hockney are his Rake's Progress scenes that transplant Hogarth to America. Choose yours in this survey of his experiments in printmaking.
• Dulwich Picture Gallery, London SE21 from 5 February until 11 May

David Bailey
Glamour agogo in this big retrospective of a man who knows how to make photography flamboyant.
• National Portrait Gallery, London WC2H from 6 February until 1 June

Darren Almond
Spooky romantic landscape photographs taken with a long exposure by the light of the full moon.
• White Cube Bermondsey, London SE1 until 13 April

Return Journey
British artists including Chester's Ryan Gander and Ellesmere Port's Mark Leckey explore their connections with the places they come from.
• Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno LL30 until 6 April

Masterpiece of the week

The radical painter Courbet preached "realism" in 19th-century France. Nothing demonstrates what he meant by reality more eloquently than this great painting of a dish of fruit, at the National Gallery. The mottled skin of each apple and the brown hulk of the pomegranate is almost violently visible. The autumnal palette is not sentimental, but sensually immediate. This is the world. This is life you can taste and touch.

Image of the weekWhat we learned this week

Why Disney's princesses have been turned into porn stars – and why it's a good thing

That a chastity bra has been designed – and it only opens when a woman finds true love

That Martin Creed's new show is all about faeces, phalluses – and a Ford Focus

How Boris Johnson is abusing planning power all around London

That Jasper Johns has made a rare public appearance in New York – in court

That James Franco is in Isaac Julien's new film about the power of money

Why so many UK-owned artworks were sold off last year

Why Cameron's making it so that we all have dim and cramped houses in the future

And finally ...

Follow us on Twitter

It's your last chance to share your art on the theme of movement. Look out for our new theme on Monday.

David HockneyDavid BaileyPhotographySculptureArtGustave CourbetMartin CreedJonathan Jones
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Why do we only hear about Jasper Johns when he gets ripped off?

The case of a foundry owner who forged one of the artist's most iconic works proves that you can copy art ... but you can't fake originality

Jasper Johns is the greatest artist alive. It seems a shame that he only enters the headlines when people rip him off. Johns was in court this week to give evidence against a Queens, New York foundry owner, Brian Ramnarine, who has now pleaded guilty to faking one of the artist's works. It was a bronze version of one of the most iconic of all American paintings: Flag. Johns had made four bronze copies of Flag in 1960 at Ramnarine's foundry. Although Ramnarine did not have permission to keep the original mould or create more sculptures from it, he made one more and tried to sell it for $11m (£6.6m).

Pictures of Jasper Johns outside the courthouse revealed his age. He is the last survivor of a great triumvirate. In the 1950s he, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly revolutionised art. They are the Cubists of contemporary art – by which I mean profound pioneers who opened the way for everything since – and yet whose originality has never quite been equalled. Now Twombly and Rauschenberg are gone.

With one court case behind him, Johns faces another when his long-time assistant goes on trial for selling his works behind his back.

In the end, these stories are just tittle tattle. The only interesting thing about the Flag trial was a moving photograph, produced in court, of Johns presenting one of the four bronze versions he made to John F Kennedy.

Why did he make those bronze flags? For money? And is it OK to scam a modern artist because modern art is a money-making scam anyway? No, for Flag is great art.

The original painting, also called Flag, is not exactly conventional. It is an object, with a waxy solidity as much sculptural as painterly.

Johns made this first Flag in 1954 to 55. When you look at its surface, fragments of newsprint peep through a semi-opaque hardened surface. Its strange texture comes from the artist's use of encaustic, a wax medium that is as old as Ancient Egypt. It gives the painting a frozen quality, a monumental stillness. Through this coloured death mask you try to read collaged news stories.

What seems simple is complex and suggestive. The realities of the US, as told in the news, peep through the iconic stars and bars. Flag is an epic poem about the United States.

When Johns cast it in bronze, he gave it another layer of monumental dignity. This was a patriotic souvenir, one he gave in high hopes to JFK. The bronze edition of Flag is not just a money-making gimmick, but a declaration of faith in the new America of the 1960s.

Flag endures. The criminal case is just one more story in its great US collage.

Jasper JohnsIntellectual propertyPaintingArtSculptureJonathan Jones
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Katie Paterson's award-winning Fossil Necklace will fail the test of history

Arts prizes are nothing without controversy – but this South Bank Sky Arts award-winning piece represents all that is safe, slight and of the establishment

A necklace of polished stones hangs in a small darkened room at the Wellcome Collection in London. Its colourful arrangement of rocks is easy on the eye. What's it all about?

Outside the viewing chamber is a key to Katie Paterson's artwork Fossil Necklace. Each glittering pebble is actually a polished fossil, and together they amount to a chart of evolution – in the form of a necklace.

Interesting. Interesting-ish anyway. But a prizewinner?

Paterson this week picked up the visual art award at the South Bank Sky Arts awards.

Prizes are only worth anyone's time if they are controversial. Handing down honours is otherwise a dead establishment game. The value of a work of art will be decided by history, not award ceremonies. The Turner and Booker prizes and the Oscars at least have the merit that they spark debate about everything from the future of the novel to the responsibilities of art. The controversies are much more interesting than the actual prizes, which are just the rough draft of a rough draft of history's verdict.

And the South Bank Awards fail the controversy test. They don't cause any arguments. They are handed down from above and reported with dull respect. So I apologise to Katie Paterson, but I am going to give her the Turner prize treatment: let's have a controversy. Is she really that special? What's her work about and why should it be elevated above all other aspiring art?

Paterson is fascinated by science. Her conceptual art finds everyday analogies for profound cosmological themes. Anyway, that's what her fans will tell you. She's certainly consistent in exploring scientific themes through contemporary art: her works have ranged from sending a "second moon" around the earth by courier service, to playing a record at the speed of the earth's rotation.

Ok, but it strikes me there is an obvious flaw in her art. It does not work on the terms it sets itself. Her metaphors are too slight to say much about either nature, or humanity's passion to understand it.

Let's look again at that Fossil Necklace. The object is pretty. But it suggests nothing much about geological time. It is a polished artefact, no more profound than any other necklace (all jewels are geological wonders, after all). Only when you look at the written key does the meaning become apparent – and then it raises the wrong sorts of questions, like, er, why put this knowledge into a necklace? Those fossils would be more interesting and informative if they were left in their original forms instead of being polished up into meaningless pebbles.

So is she making a point about the geological industry wrecking fossils? About the irony that jewels turn knowledge into dumb beauty? I don't think so.

We are meant to think that Fossil Necklace is a thought-provoking image of the immensity of time and the human brain's inability to comprehend it.

But this is too simple and fragile a message to give a work of art power. Art needs to be richer and more complex than this (or more succinct). As it is, Paterson's work is a brittle mixture of the didactic and the lighthearted.

Institutions love this art because it fits some deep need they have, right now, for art that is both trendily conceptual and reassuringly intellectual. That combination allows museums and respectable prizegivers to feel they are down with the kids, while also furthering their liberal mission to educate the public.

So Paterson gets a show in academic Cambridge, is championed by the learned Wellcome Collection and wins the South Bank Award. Doubtless she will get shortlisted for the Turner Prize. How will her ideas fare in that cruel forum?

ArtAwards and prizesJonathan Jones
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