Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 58

Drawing a blank: can artistic talent ever be taught?

While Romantics insist artists are born not made, some of the best painters, sculptors and modern artists followed conventional teaching

Modern Toss on whether artistry is a result of nature or nurture

Genius cannot be taught but skills can. And even the wildest, most visionary of artists relies on the techniques they were taught. If you want to make digital art, you need to learn to code. A training in film will help with moving-image art. So much is obvious. But today we’re in thrall to a vacuous Romanticism that insists artists are born not made.

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Emeka Ogboh’s Brexit lament, the brilliant Joan Eardley and a Viking hoard – the week in art

Ogboh fills Edinburgh’s Burns Monument with sound, Eardley’s seascapes get a welcome outing and a detectorist’s extraordinary find – all in your weekly dispatch

Emeka Ogboh: Song of the Union
A sound installation of Robert Burns’s Auld Lang Syne, sung in the languages of the EU, to protest and mourn Britain’s departure.
• Burns Monument, Edinburgh, until 29 August

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Stuffed Tokyo super-rats and Isaac Julien’s abolition hero – the week in art

A vibrant survey of the Olympic capital in art and a 10-screen video devoted to anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass – all in your weekly dispatch

Tokyo: Art and Photography
Exciting and eye-opening survey of one of the world’s great art cities, from 17th-century paintings of courtesans and samurai to a stuffed specimen of today’s urban super-rats.
• Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 29 July to 3 January.

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Tokyo review – lust and loneliness in Japan’s pleasure quarters

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
A seductive encounter with past and present at the Olympic city shows that Tokyo practically invented modern art

Love hotels and cross-dressers make Tokyo’s nightlife eye-popping – and that’s just in 18th-century woodblock prints. The Ashmolean’s seductive overview of the Olympic city’s art sets these classics alongside images of contemporary Tokyo to create a thrilling and informative encounter with one of the world’s great art capitals.

Past and present meet for a sultry encounter in the night. A wall is lit up by Mika Ninagawa’s intensely coloured photos of blue- and pink-haired clubbers. They are so now – yet close by in the same gallery is a painted scroll from the 1600s that is just as provocative. It depicts the pleasure quarter of Edo, as Tokyo was then called, which became Japan’s capital when the Tokugawa shoguns united the country in the 17th century. It was famous for its pleasure quarter, “the floating world”, and the new art genre it inspired – ukiyo-e, “pictures of the floating world”. In the scroll, samurai warriors are seen visiting courtesans. But samurai were banned from the pleasure quarter so they wear straw hats pulled down to hide their faces. The comically phallic swords peeping out from their robes give them away.

Tokyo: Art & Photography is at Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, from 29 July to 3 January.

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Oscar Murillo: Frequencies review – adult-approved teenage rebellion

Cardinal Pole Catholic School, east London
The artist has handed over the canvas to give schoolkids from around the world an outlet for their adolescent rage. The problem is, they’re not all rebels like him

Adults are not schoolchildren and – as all good teachers know – you’re deluding yourself if you pretend to be one of the kids. Oscar Murillo, best known as one of the four artists who chose to share the 2019 Turner prize, has ignored that wisdom. He has returned to his former school and to his adolescence. After his family came from Colombia to Britain when he was 10, he was educated at Cardinal Pole Catholic School in Hackney, east London. It is an impressive place. Indeed the evident seriousness of the school – and the articulacy of its senior pupils, who are spending the summer as helpers for the project’s producers Artangel – oddly shows up the bad-boy fantasy of Murillo’s project.

Apparently Murillo was unhappy, frustrated and rebellious at school. He sees the same alienation in the pen marks and cuts pupils everywhere leave on their desks. So, since 2014, he has been providing school classes across the world with pieces of canvas to graffiti as they wish, assembling a global archive of dissident art made by 10 to 16-year-old kids at 350 high schools in 30 countries. In his installation of this entire hoard in Cardinal Pole’s hall, the boredom of a planet of adolescents seeps from thousands of inky doodles. A rotating selection is displayed on glass-covered tables while the rest are stacked on shelves in a well-organised archive to be consulted with the help of volunteers, as if you were in a library researching a PhD on the teenage mind.

Frequencies is at Cardinal Pole Catholic School, London, from 24 July until 30 August

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Is Oscar Murillo the new Jean Dubuffet? Plus the real Dubuffet! – the week in art

Murillo shows work he commissioned by children in 30 countries, Alison Watts says it with flowers and time is ticking to catch the must-see Dubuffet – all in your weekly dispatch

Oscar Murillo: Frequencies
The joint winner of the 2019 Turner prize exhibits artworks he commissioned from children at 350 schools in 30 countries. Is Murillo the new Dubuffet?
• Artangel at Cardinal Pole school, Hackney, London, 24 July to 30 August.

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Little Canaletto’s sordid city in the sky – Bellotto: The Königstein Views Reunited review

National Gallery, London
Bernardo Bellotto, the nephew and pupil of Canaletto, channelled his master’s Venetian magic into these five sublime views of a fortress in deepest Germany

We like to identify great upheavals in the arts with new centuries. So Romanticism began on 1 January 1800? Well, Turner and Beethoven were well into their stride by then. And modernism came along on the same date in 1900? Hmm, that makes it hard to account for Van Gogh, Munch and Cézanne. The National Gallery’s small but seismic summer exhibition exposes how shallow this thinking is. It does so by bringing together five scenes by a forgotten 18th-century artist, Bernardo Bellotto, whose depictions of deepest Germany, painted in 1756-58, are the first true stirrings of Romantic storminess.

A name inscribed on the frame of one of the paintings reveals why Bellotto has been so neglected: it calls him Il Canalettino, Little Canaletto, because he was the overshadowed nephew and pupil of the famous painter of the carnivals, gondolas, piazzas and waters of 18th-century Venice. But Bellotto went north, and used the skills his uncle taught him to paint a less picturesque, more troubled Europe.

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Run from the flaming van of the apocalypse! Folkestone Triennial review

With its line-dancers, good behaviour zones and abstract skatepark, the Kent extravaganza is big on fun. So thank goodness for the incendiary installations hammering us with home truths

In seaside Folkestone on one of the hottest days of the year, the ethereal glitter of the English Channel merged with the empty azure sky. So why did an artwork by Mike Stubbs have to spoil it? That flaming van was a low blow. But there it was, parked on the quay, painted hot-rod red, yellow and black with images of blazing forests. It is called Climate Emergency Services and is even equipped with a gun, perhaps for shooting down denial.

Stubbs demonstrates that it does not always pay to be subtle. I had my appreciation of a sunny day suddenly ruined by his crudely powerful reminder that our weather is no longer natural. But Climate Emergency Services is also a challenge to much of the other art in this three-yearly festival of public art in a chaotically lovely town. Art today is at a crossroads: has it got the right to be sophisticated entertainment or should it be hammering us with home truths?

The Folkestone Triennial runs from 22 July until 2 November

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Gilbert and George, obsession and a Victorian necropolis – the week in art

The art duo invade Folkestone, Canaletto’s nephew studies a German castle, and Phyllida Barlow towers over a decaying cemetery – all in your weekly dispatch

Bellotto
This haunting painter of sublime views was Canaletto’s nephew but the paintings gathered here obsessively study a German castle – we’re not in Venice any more.
• National Gallery, London, from 22 July to 31 October.

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‘He punched you in the stomach with horror’: the genius of Christian Boltanski

The great French conceptual artist, who has died at 76, was the conscience of contemporary art. His monuments to atrocities were huge and all-encompassing, awakening us to the suffering of others

Christian Boltanski first grabbed my attention in 1995, while I was watching a US news show. Among the murders and mayhem was a story about an artist putting thousands of items of lost property on display in New York’s Grand Central station. It was news because it was weird – the use of everyday things, unchanged, was still unusual in art then, not to mention the sheer scale of the installation in such a public place.

But beyond the sensation, it was heart-wrenching. Amid what private crisis did someone leave behind their football helmet, their Bible? And that was not all. These former possessions of unknown people, these enormous numbers of relics laid out for inspection in a busy railway station, resembled the clothes and shoes of the murdered millions in the Holocaust.

Related: Christian Boltanski: the artist counting the seconds till his own demise

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