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Matthew Collings and Emma Biggs ponder
the Luc Tuymans phenomenon
Luc Tuymans
Tate Modern, London
23 June – 26 September 2004
Is the amount of love accorded to Luc Tuymans
excessive?
In one of his smooth-operator interviews he says: ‘ …My
pictures are of course intrinsically dependent on the powers-that-be,
which affects my perceptions, interests, choices, the meanings I
am aiming for, even the execution of the work. Which in turn also
releases them from the clutches of intimacy, sensitivity and exclusivity.’
With this, he gives an accurate picture of
the successful artist as a mirror of critical theology. No, the
love is not excessive. The only consolation we have for Tuymans
being such an enviable paragon of art world virtue is that he doesn’t
do his stuff himself, society does it through him.
There used to be an academy with History Painting
at the top and Genre Painting at the bottom. Realism smashed the
mould, Modernism disposed of it thoroughly, but although it was
broken and swept away, Post-Postmodernism has reconstructed it.
Tuymans is the Emperor of this new academy. And the non-hierarchical,
non-academicians are all apologising like mad in the catalogue for
the Tuymans show. Instead of History Painting the new academy has
the Limp and the Political at the top. In this context Tuymans zings
five stars with all the bananas and cherries. He’s at the top
of a new hierarchy of understatement where the clever realise that
the banal is the profound – he’s the Donnie Darko version
of Richter.
When we read in a footnote to one of the essays
that he’s somewhere between Rembrandt, Rubens and Velázquez,
and we think of his thinking-about-what’s-on-TV-tonight-while-sticking-it-on-with-a-gloss-brush
painting style, our jaws drop with admiration both for Emma Dexter
(the writer) and Tuymans. Of course art is a place of high meaning:
it’s not surprising that the chat about art tends to be often
a place of grandiose falsity.
But armed with the knowledge you’re supposed
to have, you see something that maybe wasn’t apparent before.
For example you look at a work from the ‘Leopoldville’
series and instead of feeling as you did before, that a well-known
political message is being delivered on a plate (which just makes
you angry), you see that he’s impressively deft.
He does a human skin lampshade and he does
a gas chamber, and he does the murderous leader of the Congo –
the good things are minimal means, tasteful colour and a clear selection
of subject matter, where the abject is mixed up with the politically
clichéd. He never takes more than a day per painting. He
does pared-back colour, bound to appeal to beige-lovers. Tints rather
than assertive or problematic – that is, he never risks vulgarity.
The fruit machine pays to the max.
There’s strategic thinking behind the
evocative failure to communicate anything direct – the aim
is to make eerie, because eerie is in. It’s towards an overwhelming
self-conscious non-modernity. In a world of gloss he gives us the
decayed. He takes things that can only exist in a postmodern world
and ghostlifies them, and makes them seem old.
He doesn’t really make things seem old
– he refers to a kind of idealised state of oldness. By ghostlifying
a still from Navy Seals he makes a crap movie eerie, and so summons
into consciousness foreboding shadowy thoughts about war and American
imperialism. And by ghostlifying some fruit and a jug in Still Life
he reminds us of Cézanne (at least from a distance) and summons
up all our conflicting thoughts about High Art.
Still Life of course is against all the laws
of Cézanne. It just uses the objects of Cézanne –
a jug, some apples, some pears. We learn that the painting, which
is wall-size, is his response to 9/11, and it’s big because
he wants to ‘find the big in the small’. We can only register
how awful the painting is, visual flab with some rhetoric attached.
We suddenly wonder if that’s true of everything in the show.
No, it isn’t. Well, does that change our initial response to
Still Life? No, it remains unsuccessful. The scale is too big and
it’s all disappointingly mannered. Another painting nearby,
Portrait, is just as flabby though very small – so it’s
not like scale is usually perfect with him.
We look at the video at the entrance to the
show and see Tuymans pseuding-on about Auschwitz – he seems
to be an offensive charlatan. We look at Diagnostic View VII –
we wonder what someone else sees. Presumably a breast in art, kind
of dowdy, all too human, in washed-out non-colour, reminds the normal
person of Jenny Saville, Lucien Freud, Stanley Spencer. They’re
mistaken of course. He’s something new.
If it’s possible to express a reservation,
to step aside from all the love, well, it’s not that we want
Cézanne back. It’s more that Tuymans is not for an audience
that isn’t prepared to do homework. Cézanne offers a
bit of content even if you don’t read the catalogue or the
wall labels: there is communication by virtue of the liveliness
of the depiction. Obviously here that’s not true. But that
doesn’t mean Tuymans isn’t powerfully communicating something.
Emma Biggs and Matthew Collings do collaborative paintings about
colour. Biggs is a mosaicist and Collings is an art writer. They
live in London.
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