Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 245

Sly Stallone, Banksy-inspired graffiti and Photoshop fails – the week in art

Stallone opens an art show in St Petersburg as Frank Gehry takes London. Plus Photoshop errors, human cheese and Banksy's last stunt in New York – in your art dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Art Turning Left: How Values Changed Making 1789-2013
This exhibition seems intellectually confused. Why does political art have to be left wing? Hitler used art. The noted art collector Charles Saatchi helped put Thatcherism in power. As for the French Revolution, with which this show starts, was that "left wing" in today's terms? The painting by Jacques-Louis David that features here portrays the death of a man who sent hundreds to the guillotine. Yet the range of art, from Jacobin imagery to the Guerrilla Girls, is full of interest.
• Tate Liverpool, Liverpool L3 from 8 November until 2 February 2014

Other exhibitions this week

Castiglione: Lost Genius
This exhibition champions a forgotten 17th-century draughtsman as an art giant.
• Queen's Gallery, London SW1A until 16 March 2014

Uproar!
A survey of the London Group, including David Bomberg, CRW Nevinson and other powerful artists of the early 20th century.
• Ben Uri Museum, London NW8 until 2 March

Edward Burtynsky
One of the most compelling photographers of our time turns his lens on water, from the dams and rice fields of China to the American southwest.
• Flowers Gallery, London W1S until 23 November

Derek Jarman
This show features intense and gothic works of art by the much missed avant garde romantic.
• Wilkinson Gallery, London E2 until 1 December

Masterpiece of the week

The portrait of young Artemidorus on his mummy case is one of the most moving faces that survives from the ancient world. It is a masterpiece of realism that comes from a time when Roman artistic values encountered the Egyptian cult of the dead. It is all the more haunting for being still affixed to his wrapped and encased body.
• British Museum, London WC1B

Image of the week
What we learned this week

That Sly Stallone is very serious about his art

All about Frank Gehry's first building in London

What happens when architects go overboard – into superyacht territory

That Banksy has inspired a project on Britain's worst graffiti – called Wanksy

The hilarity that ensues when Photoshopping goes awry

Why a group of campaigners are so desperate for Marina Abramović to retire

How armpit brie, banana-flavoured E.coli and cigarette butts are shaking up the design world

Why a rising star of photography is so influenced by Freud

That the NYPD locked down Banksy's last stunt in New York

And finally …

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ArtPhotographyPaintingArchitectureStreet artBanksyFrank GehrySylvester StalloneEdward BurtynskyJonathan Jones
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The stuff of nightmares: take our ghoulish Halloween art quiz

From Munch to Poe to Rothko, ghouls and ghosts have inspired many artists. Test your knowledge of spooky art

Jonathan Jones

MARFA: the campaign desperate to make Marina Abramović retire

A satirical campaign to raise funds via PayPal for the controversial performance artist's retirement begs the question: who in British art deserves a similar roasting?

What do you mean you haven't heard of MARFA? It stands for the Marina Abramović Retirement Fund of America and it is an online campaign to stop the renowned performance artist– before it's too late. (Marfa is also the name of a renowned arts colony in Texas, adding to the sense that someone is taking a cruel swipe at the American art world.)

The Stop Marina Abramović blog is a rolling joke of fake Abramović stories and quotes, dedicated to satirising someone who is, in the campaign's words, "the very definition of humourless".

"On December 29, 2013, Marina Abramović plans to eat onions for 36 hours in front of a Chipotle Mexican Grill franchise in a to-be-determined mid-western city. Your generous donations to MARFA will work to undermine this nefarious performance … "

With entries like this, the site is a bit like an arty version of the satirical news outlet The Onion – except it's dedicated to mocking a single person.

Marina Abramović may be an extraordinary artist, but it's true that she is not exactly a comic figure and that her intense persona has become synonymous with art in America. Her recent projects range from a retrospective at MoMA to collaborations with pop stars like Jay Z and Lady Gaga.

On the whole, the anti-Abramović blog seems to preserve its sense of humour and avoid being too hateful.

It also begs the question: who in British art might elicit a similar roasting? Is there anyone we should campaign to stop? Well … no need to ask; the Stuckists have been trying to stop the usual suspects for years. They campaign against the Turner prize, Nicholas Serota and … Jonathan Jones.

If I was going to lose my marbles and try to stop someone in the world of art it would be Grayson Perry. I know, you love him. In criticising Perry I feel a bit like Frank Grimes, the character in The Simpsons who went nuts trying to convince everyone that Homer is bad. My objection to Perry is that he is not such a talented artist. His pots, tapestries and drawings are deeply so-so, which he gets away withbecause people are fascinated by his persona and comments. Which is fine, except, as I say, for the actual art.

Oh, there I go. Sharing your dislikes in public may not be so popular. I should probably just let Grayson Perry be. And MARFA should probably think about its own retirement instead of hounding an artist loved by many.

Marina AbramovicPerformance artJonathan Jones
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Wanksy: celebrating Britain's worst graffiti art

Not all graffiti achieves Banksy-like status … Wanksy's well-aimed satire highlights the mundane, from pedestrian graffiti on street signs to animals given giant knobs

• The world's worst graffiti – in pictures
• Send us your photos of bad graffiti by clicking the blue GuardianWitness button

If there's one thing more pretentious than graffiti art – the throwaway turned into the priceless – it's books about graffiti art. They treat so-so street art as if it were by Titian and aim for the coffee tables of the middle class with their colour spreads of Banksy masterpieces.

I can't, therefore, resist noting an alternative art book that deserves a spot on your Christmas wish list. It is called Wanksy: Interpreting a Graffiti Virtuoso.

The authors, Marc Blakewill and James Harris, have gone around photographing street art – except it ain't art. They have sought out some of the basest, most moronic everyday graffiti and reproduced it in full-page colour pictures with texts that analyse it in a deadpan fashion. Having written about Banksy three times in a month, I get the joke.

For instance, some fool has scrawled MILLWALL in blue paint over a ("proper" graffiti artist's?) white stencil of a deer, and enhanced its anatomy. The authors lyrically comment: "Millwall; a white deer; a dangling blue penis. As enigmatic as the quatrains of Nostradamus, as mystifying as hieroglyphics, one could gaze at this in awe for hours."

Gazing at the words "PAUL N RICH" painted on a window so it can only be read properly from the inside, they get even more carried away: "Wanksy's most famous work using transparent perspective. Two men gaze out into the world and see themselves as the headline acts of their own lives. Paul and Rich. Meanwhile, the rest of the world looks in and thinks, 'Eh, what's that? Oh, those dickheads have forgotten to write backwards.' Clearly, we see ourselves differently from the way others do."

To collect the works of Wanksy, these discerning critics have visited bus shelters and derelict sites all over Britain. Their photographs gather some of the nation's worst efforts at graffiti. Their cutting parody of the habit of art critics to talk total bollocks praises these nasty daubs as if they were by Rembrandt.

Someone has written on a pavement: JOE HAS A BIG KNOB Our intrepid art critics explain: "This is a complex and ambiguous piece. On first impression, it appears to be a simple boast by someone called Joe: 'I've got a big one!' Yet it is clearly more subtle and manipulative. How will men see these words? Only by stopping and looking past their own manhood. A smug Joe thus imagines men with their heads hanging downwards, contemplating the meagreness of their own members compared to his."

They offer similarly profound insights into such masterpieces of street art as: "Harry was here fucking ur mum" "Ryan does Anal" And the immortal street sign: "Strictly No Admittance UP THE BUM." Wanksy is a well-aimed satire on the pretensions of people who elevate street art as the philosophy of the age. But it's not as good a joke as the career of Banksy himself, whose work is revered, priced and discussed in ways that will give later generations a good laugh at us all.

BanksyStreet artArtJonathan Jones
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Daumier's satirical art hits with the force of a drone attack

Like the art of Hogarth and Goya, the French caricaturist's work – in a new exhibition at the Royal Academy – is proof the political satire of yesterday can still speak to us today

What's the difference between an artist and a cartoonist? Newspaper cartoonists would argue there is none. The talent it takes to create satirical images of politicians is self-evidently on a par with, or greater than, the stuff that gets you a Turner prize.

Yet there are comparatively few examples of artists who have made their contemporaries laugh at the foibles and fools of the day and gone on to be feted as great artists. One is William Hogarth. Another is Honoré Daumier, whose new exhibition at the Royal Academy is a fascinating encounter with a truly strange genius. Daumier was a political satirist who also made pure art of a singularly haunting nature.

The political world he mocked is long gone – he died in 1879 – and this remoteness can muffle his cartoons, especially for a British audience whose grasp of 19th-century France may be shaky. The Royal Academy could do more to bring to life characters like François Guizot and Felix Barthe (government figures mocked by Daumier). I'm not asking for animatronic statues, just a clearer sense of French history – instead of which the show nearly loses itself in pursuing fashionable art historical theories about the nature of spectatorship. It's so in thrall to academ that next to one painting we are given the words of an art historian telling us what to think about it. A precise account of the 1830 revolution would be a lot more helpful.

But when you see Daumier's lithograph Gargantua in the first room of this show, its power is timeless. A fat giant sits on a chair above a ragged crowd who send food up a chute into his greedy mouth. He gets it all; the people get nothing. There's something truly vile about his tiny dead eyes and gross paunch – he's a brainless, heartless eating machine.

To his contemporaries, the pear-shaped head of this monster made him instantly recognisable as King Louis Philippe, who ruled France from 1830 to 1848. Daumier and his subversive colleagues on the magazine La Caricature hilariously pinned him down as a human pear. Yet compared with English caricarists like Gillray, Daumier's art always has a sombre, realistic undertone. In his devastating lithograph Rue Transnonain le Avril 1834, he portrays the victims of a massacre by the French state. The inhabitants of an entire Paris building were wiped out after a riot. At the centre of Daumier's picture, a man lies like a bloodied sack, his child crushed beneath him as he fell back, apparently bayoneted. An older man's dead face looks emptily upward. It's a Bloody Sunday, a drone attack.

In a later satire, Daumier shows a ruined city where corpses litter the streets. "L'empire c'est la paix," says the caption, contrasting the French dictator Louis Napoleon's promises of peace with the savage reality of war with Prussia.

These images still speak deeply of the horrors of oppression and war.

Daumier is intensely serious even when he's being funny. He has a lot in common with Goya. And like Goya, he tends to wander off from the news into his own dark brooding mind. Alongside the magazine work that was his bread and butter, he paints images that are fantastically weird. His brushwork is swirling and shadowy, like a fog rising from the city streets. He portrays a man clinging to a knotted rope, an eerie image of the isolated human figure suspended in a void. He paints crowds of people fleeing some enigmatic disaster, or sitting bleakly in a third-class railway carriage.

The hollowed out faces of Daumier's working-class crowd anticipate the zombie cities of Edvard Munch. Hungry, scared, beaten down, his people sit passively in a train carriage or stare in horror at Julius Caesar from the groundlings at the theatre.

He paints strange sad circus folk who stand as still and silent as the carnival characters of Picasso's rose period. And if they share an interest in the circus, not even Picasso could match Daumier's abstracted meditations on the great Spanish novel Don Quixote.

As references to Goya, Munch and Picasso probably make clear, Daumier is a precociously modern artist. This is not the great exhibition he deserves, but it is unmissable nevertheless. Daumier looks into the heart of power and the hearts of the people.

ArtRoyal Academy of ArtsPablo PicassoWilliam HogarthExhibitionsDrawingJonathan Jones
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Banksy, you're wrong: the soul of New York is at street level

Banksy's fake New York Times op ed targets the anodyne One World Trade Centre – but as Lou Reed saw, the real life of the city lies in its people, not its buildings

Banksy has written a would-be New York Times op ed piece – he says the newspaper refused it, so you can read it on his website here – saying the dullness of the skyscraper that has finally risen to replace the World Trade Centre proves that terrorism has won. It's a fearful building, he complains, whose message is that New York is cowed by the attacks that killed so many people on a September morning.

He wouldn't say that if he'd been there in the months after the attacks, or the years that immediately followed. It was simply astonishing to experience the wounded city's irrepressible joy. The pleasure people take in life in Manhattan is so infectious; it's a place that fizzes.

The loss the city suffered was absorbed. But that terrible day was not forgotten. Deep arguments about the nature of memory and the power of architecture to represent it have indeed resulted in a compromised and less-than-charismatic building on the site of the World Trade Centre. Does that say anything about New York as a city, about the courage of its culture? Not really. Just about the pain of the attacks.

Duh, Banksy, the life of a city is in its people, not its buildings. If New York was just tall buildings and canyons of glass it would be a boring place – however great the architecture. It's always been what happens at ground level that made the Apple so big.

A young man heads uptown to Lexington, 125. He feels sick and dirty – more dead than alive. He's waiting for his man.

As I write this, John Cale is dragging a chair across a recording studio floor. I'm marking Lou Reed's passing with the Velvet Underground – and I don't hear any songs about skyscrapers. I hear Reed sing about drugs and sex and the grubby harshness of the city: "all the dead bodies piled up in mounds".

New York is terrible and beautiful, like the music of Reed and Cale. The skyscrapers are its stage set. The drama is human. Honestly Banksy, you're getting a bit artsy fartsy aren't you, to read so much into steel and glass?

BanksyLou ReedVelvet UndergroundPop and rockNew YorkGround ZeroUnited StatesNew York TimesJonathan Jones
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Why Sylvester Stallone's art deserves a Rocky ride

I like Bob Dylan so I forgive his weak art. But if the name puts you off, as Stallone does me because of his macho Reaganite persona, you'll wonder why his paintings warrant any fame

Our perception of art that is made by a celebrity is completely shaped by how we feel about that celebrity. A fan is likely to forgive artistic foibles and find a bit of magic in the art of their hero. But if you're sceptical about the name, you will wonder why the art deserves any fame.

One thing is certain – celebrity art is on the rise. Bob Dylan is now a regular exhibitor of painting and sculpture. Andrew Marr has written a book about his love of drawing. And now Sylvester Stallone has a show of his paintings at the Russian Museum in St Petersburg.

This is why I say that how we see the person conditions how we respond to the art. I like Bob Dylan's music so I tend to see the strengths of his art and overlook its weaknesses. This is not that irrational. Dylan is a powerful creative figure: the distinction of his verbal art makes it reasonable to look for poetry in his visual art, even if it is not as original as his songs.

Sadly, I have no feeling for Stallone as an actor whatsoever. I did see a bit of a Rocky film this summer, dubbed into Italian, on a hotel room TV in Rome. He was fighting a Russian. USA!

It's not snobbery that has stopped me following the Stallone oeuvre in any depth – it's just that when I was a student he was associated with Reaganite movies like Rambo. Not to mention Rocky punching that Russian. His image was rightwing as well as well as dumb.

Is that why he's popular in Russia? Is Stallone a hero there because of his anti-Communist associations?

Anyway, his paintings are at the Russian Museum. In photographs they look lurid and bombastical and not very good. But of course – I am seeing the art through the distorting lens of my dislike for the macho Stallone persona.

Even his art has a 1980s look, with hints of late Warhol portraits and Julian Schnabel-style neo-expressionism. In fact he knew Warhol, whose photographic portrait of him is tender and loving.

In reality there is no law that says our heroes and antiheroes have to be themselves. Lou Reed was Warhol's friend and protégé, and his songs such as Heroin are the aural equivalents of Warhol's disaster paintings. But when Reed staged his album Berlin he worked with Schnabel, a much less cool artistic associate. Reed's career, which included plenty of mistakes, proved one thing about true art. It has nothing to with good taste. (His collaboration with Schnabel was a passionate triumph.)

Sylvester Stallone's paintings look lousy from this distance, but you never know when art will strike. Reed, after all, once wrote a great song about drinking Dubonnet and ice.

ArtSylvester StalloneLou ReedJonathan Jones
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Anthony Caro, Louise Bourgeois and the Turner prize – the week in art

Britain loses one of its finest sculptors and remembers the 'lost world' of coal mining. Plus, a Mad Hatter's tea party at the Turner prize 2013 show and why Louise Bourgeois is so loved – in your art dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Daumier (1808-1879): Visions of Paris

The French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire famously wrote an essay called The Painter of Modern Life. Today this essay, or at least its title, is widely quoted. It is often associated with the insouciant urban eye of his friend Manet. In fact, Baudelaire was a Romantic and the artists he wrote most about were not the impressionists but their elders. Daumier, a caricaturist who mocked the king for looking like a pear and whose paintings grittily observe Paris, was one of his heroes. See why in this survey of a great painter of modern life.

Royal Academy, London W1J from 26 October until 26 January 2014

Other exhibitions this week

Louise Bourgeois
The greatest female artist of the 20th century? The most influential artist of the last 50 years? Here's a chance to see for yourself why Bourgeois is so loved.
• Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh EH1 from 26 October until 23 February 2014

Sean Scully: Triptychs
This relentless master of abstract painting has never been diverted from his courageous course.
• Pallant House Gallery, Chichester PO19 from 2 November until 26 January

Lutz Bacher
Dark works by a young American in his first British show.
• ICA, London SW1Y until 17 November

Norman Cornish
The "lost world" of British coal mining remembered in words and paintings.
• University Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 until 31 January 2014

Masterpiece of the week

Courbet's raw sexual art shook Paris in the 19th century and still packs a gutsy physical punch.
• National Gallery, London WC2N

Image of the weekWhat we learned this week

As Anthony Caro passes away, we remember a sculptor of great humility and humanity

That this year's Turner prize show is all about life-class models peeing in a bucket, Mad Hatter's tea parties and the market economy

'I look like a yeti': what our Guardian writers really think of their 3D printed mini-me statues

Why one photographer literally shoots from the hip

Exactly why the male nude has been lusted after for centuries

How one photographer has been prophetic about our modern-day comfort with 24-hour surveillance

Why glitch art is on the rise

Why great art should never be digitally remastered

And finally ...

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Turner prize 2013ArtTurner prizeAwards and prizesAnthony CaroLouise BourgeoisRoyal Academy of ArtsJonathan Jones
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Is stealing sun in the Norwegian town of Rjuken playing with fire? | Jonathan Jones

Artist Martin Andersen's giant mirrors have brought light to a dark town in Norway, but our exact need for the sun is enigmatic

A group of almost nervous-looking Norwegians gather to greet the sun. It is rising in silver splendour over the mountains that enfold their little town, casting a pool of bright light around them. In this new morning they cast shadows on the town square. Real shadows at last!

But that is not the sun. It is a system of gigantic mirrors set up on the mountain to give Rjukan a sunlight boost. This town buried in a deep valley never gets any direct natural light in winter, when the northern sun is too low in the sky to get past its walls of rock. Until now. The mirrors are the brainchild of Martin Andersen, an artist who moved to Rjukan 10 years ago. His "heliostats" reflect this pool of sunlight on to the town square 365 days a year, keeping the sun in town even in the darkest winter.

Why is this artwork so fascinating? It plays with one thing that is generally deemed beyond human control. The sun is the raging force that sustains our solar system, a vast benign inferno of nuclear reactions and cosmic flares that dwarfs our orbiting and utterly dependent rock. We've done plenty to our planet, but changing the sun and the ebb and flow of its light and warmth as the earth spins will surely always be beyond us.

Modern life has found ways to avoid thinking about that fundamental primordial power that shapes our existence. Electric light creates 24-hour cities and homes that need never be dark. To change the sun itself and its impact on earth is, however, a bizarre, almost criminal, branch of underground science. There's something unholy about it, or megalomaniac – wasn't it his crazy scheme to rob Springfield of sunlight with giant sunshades that got The Simpsons' Mr Burns shot?

The first person who is known to have dreamed of toying with sunlight was the ancient Greek scientist Archimedes. One of the secret weapons he is said to have invented to defend the Greek city of Syracuse from Roman attack in the 3rd century BC was a giant parabolic mirror that concentrated sunlight so fiercely that it could set ships on fire from afar. Whether or not this solar death ray really existed, it fascinated Leonardo da Vinci so much that he tried to recreate it in his workshop in early 16th-century Rome.

Andersen's mirrors reverse the violent intent of these hubristic predecessors and bring light and warmth into a cold dark valley – a boon for "the pale little children of Rjukan", as its mayor said. The mirrors address our deep human need for sunlight. In Isaac Asimov's science fiction story Nightfall, a planet with multiple suns never experiences night. There's always at least one sun in the sky. When, every few thousand years, an eclipse does create darkness, no one can cope and an entire society goes mad.

It seems to be a myth that suicide rates soar in the Arctic Circle in the long lightless winter months. In fact suicides in Greenland are at their worst when the sun comes back at the end of winter. The self-inflicted death rate soars in spring and summer. Greenland has an extremely high suicide rate and this is surely connected with its extremes of sunlight and darkness. This suggests a deep yet mysterious connection between the sun and mental wellbeing.

There are so many myths about the sun. Pagans still go to Stonehenge for the summer solstice when all the evidence suggests Britain's neolithic monuments are aligned to the winter solstice. They seem to be "tuned" to the darkest day of the year. At Maeshowe in Orkney the sun on the darkest day sends a beam of light straight down a narrow tunnel into the central chamber of a burial mound. It's a stone telescope set up for that one moment.

Why? Perhaps so the community could know when winter was at its deepest and start looking forward to the sun's return. Then again, the ghost stories and folk tales of Europe reveal our peculiar pleasure in the dark, our ability to get gloomily addicted to winter. In Viking sagas they winter around fires telling stories and getting very, very drunk.

Our exact need for the sun is enigmatic and complex. Dark and light are both part of our lives and our minds. Perhaps, in meddling with these ancient forces, the little town of Rjukan is after all following in the dangerous footsteps of Archimedes and his burning mirrors. We don't know how the sun shapes us and we cannot control our strange relationship with it, the greatest love affair in any of our lives.

PhotographyArtNorwayEuropeNews photographyJonathan Jones
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Anthony Caro: the modernist sculptor in a too-modern world

Caro was a bold sculptor whose vision freed his art from the pedestal and the trends of his day

It was Anthony Caro's tragedy to be the wrong kind of modern artist in the wrong kind of modern world. He made abstract art at the very moment when abstraction was ceasing to look like the holy grail of the avant garde. The serious art world that contemplated his welded steel sculptures in tweedy pipe-puffing silence was about to be blown away in a purple haze of pop.

Critics can screw you up. At the end of the 1950s Caro, a young and promising sculptor, was visited in his studio by the American art critic Clement Greenberg, an extraordinarily powerful observer of art who had championed Jackson Pollock before anyone else. Greenberg had a grand vision of modernism. He said it evolved in an inevitable ascent of ruthless truth from Cezanne to abstraction. After their meeting, Caro became a bold sculptor who freed his art from the pedestal and from all figurative echoes. Greenberg hailed him as modern art's messiah. The trouble was, modern life was starting to infect modern art.

When Caro was making his gloriously free and open red steel and aluminum construction Early One Morning in 1962, the pop art movement was well under way. It was six years since Richard Hamilton had put the word pop in a collage of modern stuff. In the very same year that Caro welded Early One Morning, a Los Angeles gallery showed Andy Warhol's soup cans. In October that year, the Beatles released Love Me Do.

Pop was the future. Caro's pure and lofty modernism was born old. It imagined an audience of patient, contemplative aesthetes – but other artists were discovering a younger, faster, more sexual audience.

Yet Caro had the backing of a powerful critical elite. The impressive holdings of his art in museums all over the world bear witness to how helpful that can be. At his best, Caro was a powerfully difficult and austere modern artist. Early One Morning is not a work you can sum up in a sentence, or even 10 – it is of itself and beyond language in a similar way to such great postwar paintings as Pollock's Lavender Mist and Mark Rothko's Seagram murals. It was in fact extraordinary that a British sculptor should become the natural heir to these mighty American painters. What would a world look like in which modern art stayed loyal to Greenberg's abstract vision, and Anthony Caro rather than Andy Warhol had defined our age? Some of us might like it there, but we'd miss the shops.

Anthony CaroSculptureModernismArtJonathan Jones
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