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Être artiste et critique
: confession sur une double vie
Matthew Collings, artiste en arts visuels, est également
critique d’art pour le Times. À l’occasion
d’une de ses expositions à Londres, il livre
ses impressions sur sa double vie dans les pages du célèbre
quotidien anglais.
My life as a sitting duck
For a long time I’ve led a double life. I’ve
been an art critic and an artist. I’ve been writing
for nearly 30 years, but during that time I’ve kept
up a studio and been in exhibitions. Last week an exhibition
of abstract paintings opened at a gallery in Bond Street.
My name is on the window. Most of the work sold very quickly,
so there’s obviously something there that’s
working. How can this be? Can one really be both critic
and artist, and do the skills of one inform or undermine
the other?
In fact I’m a peculiar art critic. “21 million
people can be wrong” was the headline (which I conceived)
of one of my monthly columns for the art magazine Modern
Painters recently. It was about the supposed triumph of
Tate Modern’s first five years. I went to art school
in the 1970s, I studied painting, and I was formed intellectually
by the contemporary art world. I have that mindset but I
want to criticise it. I’m part of a scene that I often
find insipid — both the feeble objects that we’re
supposed to marvel at and the strangulated art-critical
commentary that’s supposed to justify them. And my
writing (which has been described over the years as “outlandish”,
“hilarious and horrible” and a “kamikaze
free-fall”) to some extent expresses this.
I polemicise and evangelise, plainly and ploddingly describe
things, and make jokes and hurt people’s feelings.
But it’s not just venting. The ultimate aim is to
get behind the art, not just describing the superficial
stuff of what the art object is supposed to be saying but
also the sensibility of what it’s saying. I want to
demystify the art-world mindset to reveal to ordinary educated
readers that there may be aspects of how the art world operates
that have quite simply never occurred to them. Many people
think artists live in a world very like Siri Hustvedt’s
novels: you see the beautiful model, you’re inspired;
somehow you tumble into bed with the model. The subsequent
artwork expresses all the complexity of your feelings about
your life. The statement of my writing is: “That may
go on but I’ve never experienced it.” Anybody
who signs up to this fantasy simply would not be able to
believe the boringness of what being a painter actually
involves.
The peculiar thing about my paintings is that they’re
not really mine. They’re 50/50 collaborations with
my wife, the mosaicist Emma Biggs. I do the painting but
she conceives the layouts and thinks up the colours. We
share equal billing. We never vary the roles — she
never paints and I never question her decisions about the
colour. Often I’m working blind as it were, unable
to see why certain sections of the painting are the way
they are, and sometimes only really getting the logic long
after it’s finished.
“Logic” is perhaps misleading, since the paintings
aren’t about ideas, they’re purely visual. On
the other hand there is such a thing as visual intelligence.
We think about how to make the paintings look good, have
a focus and seem to have a light turned on inside them.
We aim for something as carefully structured as late medieval
frescos. The way they relate to my writing is that they
embody the values that I find important and serious in art,
which really are visual values — the very stuff that
has been thrown out by the art world over the past 15 years
or so, as art has striven to become more like popular entertainment.
On my own I never got far with painting. When I went back
to art school to do an MA, the tutors said I needed to see
an idea through and not keep piling on different ones, which
merely resulted in meltdown. Perhaps because of my experience
as a critical observer I allowed too many possibilities.
With these paintings, though, I’ve separated out the
aspect of judging whether my decisions are right and handed
it to someone else.
How does the prospect of being judged by a critic feel?
Am I afraid? Yes. I’ve written the final flourish
of the best review so many times in my mind: “Powerful,
convincing work from this art-world maverick. Emma Biggs’s
radiant colour schemes have brought out the nervous, exquisite
sensibility that lurked beneath Collings’s often alarming
Caliban-like persona. Together they’ve rocked the
art-world. Brilliant!”
The reality may be painful but in the meantime I can still
dream.
It was only when the critical aspect was taken away from
my art practice that I was able to become an artist. I can
do a bit of post facto explaining about our paintings, but
I couldn’t actually do them on my own. My sureness
about brush strokes, and my ambitions about marks —
well, I need someone else to give them a context.
Emma has a whole range of skills in colour that have come
from years of working with colour and thinking about it.
She has absolute certainty about what should be where as
far as visual structure is concerned. I have deployed her
certainties, along with my visual skills, my years of experience
of using a brush and “doing” paintings (even
if they turned to mud in the end), and these paintings are
the result. As a critic I would say they’re pretty
successful.
Un article de Matthew Collings, publié dans The
Times, le 14 juin 2006.
Source:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,585-2223228,00.html
Retourner
au sommaire de septembre 2006
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