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Blimey!: From Bohemia to Britpop : The London Artworld from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst
At last an incredibly readable book about the London art world. For every long word there are dozens of short ones. It's a map of the mind, a journey to the heart of darkness, a step in a puddle, a ride on a tour boat, a week in traction. Learn lots of things and be entertained as well. From the anguished screaming tortured canvases of Francis Bacon to the witty ironic twirling sliced farmyard animals of Damien Hirst, let Matthew Collings take you by the hand and gently guide you through art's Yellow Pages.
208 pages, Paperback
First published May 15, 1998
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About the author
Matthew Collings
38 books17 followersMatthew Collings is a British art critic, writer, broadcaster, and artist.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 12, 2018
Quotes:
There's one where a teenage makes a sandwich that he fantasizes is a work of art, and the next thing you know it's in a vitrine in a white gallery with intellectuals peering at it.
I was born into the Bohemian class, which is a branch of the middle class. My mother went to art school and then later on taught art in secondary schools. Her mother was a dancer and her father distributed films.
In the 70s the artists who did this type of abstract art had been menaced by Conceptual art and Minimalism, which had institutional support and had become the official academy. It was always in exhibitions at the Tate and the Hayward. The abstract painters wanted painting to come back. But their idea of painting was something like the old abstract expresssionism of the 50s, but a later smoother version. AE without tears, more designed and handsome and adjusted than the original kind. The original kind always had a rhetoric of tragedy and anguish and Existentialism and psychoanalysis attached to it.
But both sides got a surprise when Schnabel arrived. Naturally postmodern, he laughed at conceptual art and formalism as well and just did whatever he liked. He was Mr. Smart in about 1978 and then Mr. Huge. We don't talk about him so much in the 90s, bc his particular brand of iconoclasm seems standard now. But he was the first monster superbrat of the 80s artworld, model for Koons and Hirst later.
The poor English artists getting nearer and nearer to us now only did a pleasing decorative, sympathetic, but not aggressively innovative type of flat abstract painting, using masking tape. They were influenced by Matisse, who said he wanted art to be like a comfortable armchair for a tired businessman to rest in.
[The YBA were more professional and curation like than in the past, so that put a mystique behind curation, with a DIY sense aligned with the establishment. An anti-art to become the norm. Commercial rebellion. Like grunge or heroin chic or Oasis.] So these first warehouse shows were not revolutionary or rebellious or anarchic or crazy or unbelievable, they were quite conventional in a way. The aim was not to buck the system but to get into it absolutely as soon as possible by showing how utterly system-friendly your art was.
So whereas in the past a work of art almost couldnt be taken seriously if it didnt have cubist fragmentation and flatness, or if it didnt have drips, or if it wasn't a photo of some pebbles--the equivalent now is if it isnt scribbled casually in brio and doesnt have a slightly unhinged air of negativity and world-weary black humor, and seeing the black heart in everything, but at the same time being in an oceanic sea of oneness with ordinary people and their obsession with pop culture and street fashion and the movies.
Waddington shows safe blue-chip Modernism, like Picasso, or market proved contemporary international stars like Schnabel.
Perhaps Francis Bacon was on his way to the studio after a night of gambling and drinking champagne. As we know, the studio is small, at the top of a narrow staircase in a quiet South Kensington mews, with a single bare light bulb and a skylight, and a writhing masterpiece of a wind-up easel. There is a chaos of brushes and paint cans and old newspapers and tubes of the most expensive purple and cadmium orange. There are trays of crumbly pastels, and sheets o f Letraset, and bottles of fabric dyes. and books open at color reproductions of infected mouths, and paintings by Velazquez. The walls and door and mirror have all been used as a pallette.
As he glides up the escalator, the station begins to hum with Francis Bacon cliches. Art after Auschwitz hums first. The horrors of the 20th century. Totalitarianism and the Bomb. The human condition theme. We are just sides of meat. The theater of cruelty. Expression shooting out of nerve endings in the fingertips. Blobs of flung white. Not bourgeois decoration. Life summed up by a dog turd he saw in the gutter once. Painting at night by the bare light bulb on inspiration and champagne. Blurred hallucination realism. Erotic male flesh.
I can't think of anyone who is really obsessed about Duchamp any more, except conservative critics who want to blame him for everything.
Jakes and Dinos Chapman: They used life size mannequins to enact a sculpture of Goya's disasters of war etchings. About the same time they were making lifesize children with sexual organs on their faces, gruesome vaginas or erections, and siamesse-twin children with vaginas growing out of the join between the faces, and the Chapman parents covered with sexual organs and horrible gouged holes, like torture marks.
They made a table-top tableau of a brain and a penis, with a mechanical hammer hammering the brain and, with each blow, a spurt of semen-like white liquid ejaculating from the plastic penis.
Marc Quinn--sculpture of man with errect penis: "the Blind Leading the Blind"
Today I saw an exhibition curated by Martin Maloney called "Die Yuppie Scum". It was a pretentious title since no artists really want to exterminate yuppies, they want them to buy their art too much, unless it was a clever Anglo-German collective noun for the artists in the show.
[Martin Maloney's paintings in the exhibit were very straightforward paintings of flowers in bowls. they look amatuer, like beginning art class esque. Was there a strategy in this? Is this how to get back at the yuppie scum, sell them something so ugly and ordinary as a shocking statement in an otherwise more overtly ironic art show?]
There's one where a teenage makes a sandwich that he fantasizes is a work of art, and the next thing you know it's in a vitrine in a white gallery with intellectuals peering at it.
I was born into the Bohemian class, which is a branch of the middle class. My mother went to art school and then later on taught art in secondary schools. Her mother was a dancer and her father distributed films.
In the 70s the artists who did this type of abstract art had been menaced by Conceptual art and Minimalism, which had institutional support and had become the official academy. It was always in exhibitions at the Tate and the Hayward. The abstract painters wanted painting to come back. But their idea of painting was something like the old abstract expresssionism of the 50s, but a later smoother version. AE without tears, more designed and handsome and adjusted than the original kind. The original kind always had a rhetoric of tragedy and anguish and Existentialism and psychoanalysis attached to it.
But both sides got a surprise when Schnabel arrived. Naturally postmodern, he laughed at conceptual art and formalism as well and just did whatever he liked. He was Mr. Smart in about 1978 and then Mr. Huge. We don't talk about him so much in the 90s, bc his particular brand of iconoclasm seems standard now. But he was the first monster superbrat of the 80s artworld, model for Koons and Hirst later.
The poor English artists getting nearer and nearer to us now only did a pleasing decorative, sympathetic, but not aggressively innovative type of flat abstract painting, using masking tape. They were influenced by Matisse, who said he wanted art to be like a comfortable armchair for a tired businessman to rest in.
[The YBA were more professional and curation like than in the past, so that put a mystique behind curation, with a DIY sense aligned with the establishment. An anti-art to become the norm. Commercial rebellion. Like grunge or heroin chic or Oasis.] So these first warehouse shows were not revolutionary or rebellious or anarchic or crazy or unbelievable, they were quite conventional in a way. The aim was not to buck the system but to get into it absolutely as soon as possible by showing how utterly system-friendly your art was.
So whereas in the past a work of art almost couldnt be taken seriously if it didnt have cubist fragmentation and flatness, or if it didnt have drips, or if it wasn't a photo of some pebbles--the equivalent now is if it isnt scribbled casually in brio and doesnt have a slightly unhinged air of negativity and world-weary black humor, and seeing the black heart in everything, but at the same time being in an oceanic sea of oneness with ordinary people and their obsession with pop culture and street fashion and the movies.
Waddington shows safe blue-chip Modernism, like Picasso, or market proved contemporary international stars like Schnabel.
Perhaps Francis Bacon was on his way to the studio after a night of gambling and drinking champagne. As we know, the studio is small, at the top of a narrow staircase in a quiet South Kensington mews, with a single bare light bulb and a skylight, and a writhing masterpiece of a wind-up easel. There is a chaos of brushes and paint cans and old newspapers and tubes of the most expensive purple and cadmium orange. There are trays of crumbly pastels, and sheets o f Letraset, and bottles of fabric dyes. and books open at color reproductions of infected mouths, and paintings by Velazquez. The walls and door and mirror have all been used as a pallette.
As he glides up the escalator, the station begins to hum with Francis Bacon cliches. Art after Auschwitz hums first. The horrors of the 20th century. Totalitarianism and the Bomb. The human condition theme. We are just sides of meat. The theater of cruelty. Expression shooting out of nerve endings in the fingertips. Blobs of flung white. Not bourgeois decoration. Life summed up by a dog turd he saw in the gutter once. Painting at night by the bare light bulb on inspiration and champagne. Blurred hallucination realism. Erotic male flesh.
I can't think of anyone who is really obsessed about Duchamp any more, except conservative critics who want to blame him for everything.
Jakes and Dinos Chapman: They used life size mannequins to enact a sculpture of Goya's disasters of war etchings. About the same time they were making lifesize children with sexual organs on their faces, gruesome vaginas or erections, and siamesse-twin children with vaginas growing out of the join between the faces, and the Chapman parents covered with sexual organs and horrible gouged holes, like torture marks.
They made a table-top tableau of a brain and a penis, with a mechanical hammer hammering the brain and, with each blow, a spurt of semen-like white liquid ejaculating from the plastic penis.
Marc Quinn--sculpture of man with errect penis: "the Blind Leading the Blind"
Today I saw an exhibition curated by Martin Maloney called "Die Yuppie Scum". It was a pretentious title since no artists really want to exterminate yuppies, they want them to buy their art too much, unless it was a clever Anglo-German collective noun for the artists in the show.
[Martin Maloney's paintings in the exhibit were very straightforward paintings of flowers in bowls. they look amatuer, like beginning art class esque. Was there a strategy in this? Is this how to get back at the yuppie scum, sell them something so ugly and ordinary as a shocking statement in an otherwise more overtly ironic art show?]
July 27, 2011
Collings gives the reader a genial tour of British art from Bacon to Hirst. I have always enjoyed Matthew Collings tv shows about art and his books are great too. He brings a flippant, witty, slacker attitude towards the art world, which makes his books much funnier and more readable than most art writing. However, he also knows his stuff and a lot of it can be read on several levels. You don't need to know much about art or postmodern theory to enjoy it, but if you do know a bit about it you will appreciate some of the referrences more.
September 20, 2015
a bit strange compilation of ideas and notes and photos of various artwork... but overall it gives a nice and easy feel and approach to art, so I liked it, as it seemeeddifferent to most other art books I have read, in which the authors are trying to be (well in reality some are) terribly clever... in this book the author only tries to show that he was everywhere...
but seriously, a good quick read, loads of photos of artwork from the time, a few insider stories, and does leave you with an overall impression as to what it is all about...
but seriously, a good quick read, loads of photos of artwork from the time, a few insider stories, and does leave you with an overall impression as to what it is all about...
August 26, 2011
A rambling and meaningless account about this artist's experience with the 90's art scene. I bought this thinking I'd get a lesson on why the art trend in the 90's was considered art in the first place, and instead got a book with photos of old naked men framed in by turds, an artless photo of an old man's dangling genitalia, and accounts of last minute shows thrown together with cardboard signs in abandoned warehouses by talentless hacks. Blimey is right.
September 21, 2008
Bitchy, gossipy, and thoroughly entertaining look at the London art scene through its 90s boom. The critical insights are scattershot at best, but Collings voice is winning throughout. Think of it as a good extended magazine piece. Nice pictures, too.
April 8, 2009
Highly readable survey of British contemporary art. Discussion of galleries at end seemed irrelevant (and is probably dated by now).
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews