In the anything-goes, free-form era of contemporary criticism, only those whose tenure is guaranteed can dare to be dull. They write to keep a well-fed hand in. Others tap dance. They’re as good as their clicks. Dull used to be the critical norm. Few long for a return to those days, but back then, attention came to critics who articulated a rigorous set of ideas, not necessarily a snappy approach to the sentence.
Personally, I’m all about snappy. And instead of possessing concepts which I bring to bear on the art, I respond to the ideas in the art. Paul Valery called it the equivalent of playing a card game whose rules change with every hand.
Undoubtedly, that approach is generational. I started at the tail end of the anti-Clement Greenberg era and never left. (Marat/Sade: We’re all normal and we want our freedom.) But there are limits. No, there aren’t, but there should be. Critics who free associate in front of an artwork aren’t critics. They’re flying kites in their heads. They’re taking a test for a psychology course.
Few artists attract as much snap, crackle and pop nonsense as Luc Tuymans. His paintings are slippery blanks, unpleasantly representational without being dark. His moments are worth missing yet there they are, the thin-lipped equivalents of gray days.
The Secretary of State 2005
oil on canvas, 18 x 24-1/4 inches David Zwirner Gallery
The image above is perfectly transportable. Seeing it reproduced online is not significantly different from seeing it in person, which is, of course, remarkable for an oil painting. Note the tooth and the Buddha ear. The tooth on the left is like one slightly-longer table leg tipping the balance out of true. The long earlobe? Not in this case an old-soul signifier.
Pigeons
2001, oil on canvas
128 x 156cm (Image via)
Exhibit A, part of an essay on Tuymans from the online Saatchi Gallery:
Luc Tuymans’s pigeons bop in dumb disarray. Dirty and disease-ridden, they’re a strangely curious mob, a metaphoric stand-in for ourselves. Painted in the muted tones of history, Luc Tuymans offers a chilling ultimate truth about humankind. He makes a cold comedy of a terrifying thought.
Dumb disrray? Who you calling dumb? Real life street pigeons can, when motivated by food, easily learn to tell the difference between Van Gogh and Chagall. (Abstract here.)
Dirty and disease-ridden? Not these pigeons. They’re color inflections on canvas. In their price range, believe me they’re cared for.
Muted tones of history? What? Stand-ins for ourselves? Says who? Chilling ultimate truth? Cold comedy? Come on.
Even the great Peter Schjeldahl flails around for meaning in his (as always) richly entertaining essay on Tuymans in The New Yorker. Schjeldahl claims Tuyman’s work dramatizes the fallen state of painting since the 1960s. If anything, it dramatizes the reverse, that you don’t have to be an angel to dance upon the head of a pin as the audience swells around you.
I am very happy to hear someone finally criticise Tyman’s work. I have never understood all the hoop-la surrounding it. The work has always seemed vapid to me; lacking any content or formal qualities. I guess that must be his point but it just seems too easy and academic…
I agree, no matter how many times i’ve seen Luc Tuyman’s work, it’s impossible for me to enter it. Some of his executions seem so minimized that they end up being shallow. So then i spend time trying to dig deeper, but find that there’s really nothing there to satisfy. It gives me the feeling that maybe i’m “just not getting it”..the Rice painting especially grates on my nerves. It’s high school level painting.
I tend to disagree with most of the statements here. Tuyman’s practice is operating on the metaphoric and symbolic level. He is culling from visual culture is a way that points to the banality and horror of mediated images. This agenda makes for interesting contradictions. This pair of paintings accomplishes just that. Take Condi Rice. She is a black female in a position of Republican power. Really? How many black, upper class republicans is she getting votes from? Please note the irony. Does she represent anything but a token gesture in the political sphere? She embodies a minority of the absurd. Yet she remains one of the few individuals of her gender and race to hold that position of power in this country.
As far as formalism is concerned, Tuymans isn’t interested in making a big, perceptually stunning image. This heroic sentiment, which is a carry over from Abstract Expressionism, is no longer viable as evidenced by his small paintings. While many painters are either stuck in some recycled post-war formalism or creating cliche pop surrealism. Tuyman’s work volleys back and forth between the abstract and the real. They remain ‘unfinished’ because he’s not trying to make a pretty thing for someone’s wall, which is what most work becomes outside the hands of artists, critics, and historians.