Global Greasy Pole

Back to Charing Cross tube station for a return visit to the National Portrait Gallery where I was blogging just a couple of weeks ago.  When I went there last time it was to take a look at Behind the mask, another mask, an odd sort of hybrid show which interweaves a bunch of private snaps from the gender fluid Surrealist Claude Cahun taken un the 1930 and ‘40s, along with some of the more recent and much more deliberately constructed self-portraits of the Turner Prize winning YBA, Gillian Wearing.  Essentially, the show is a bit of a self-indulgent fancy dress parade in which Cahun gets to deck herself out in disguises to role play a series of androgynous characters that range from dandy to muse and siren to strongmen.  After which Wearing provides her contemporary echoing update of the game by morphing and masking into a similarly varied mixture of alternate personages that include Warhol and Mapplethorpe lookalikes, a string of other family members and a computer generated version of herself as an OAP.

It’s an ok-ish sort of a Conceptualist exhibition, interesting enough to divert the attention for half an hour or so but not particularly pretty nor groundbreakingly profound.  I suppose it’s possible to reference themes of appropriation, homage, pastiche and all the cross-cultural can of wrigglers relating to identity politics and who we are, how we look and why we should all be constantly trying to reinvent ourselves.  But, by the close of the show, I’m still not sure that the average viewer would walk away with a very strong or accurate picture of what either of these two artists actually, physically looked like in real life, nor have any deeper insights into their personal psychological profiles – the kinds of basic biographical stuff that traditional portraiture at least attempted to provide.  In short, I think it’s probably fair enough to label the show as a sort of curatorial examination of how to deconstruct the classical portrait genre in order to then review it from the perspective of our new contemporary Post-Modern world order.

Now, I appreciate a bit of curatorial experimentation as much as the next rambler-cum-blogger and am the first to admit that dipping into new, intellectually speculative waters can occasionally lead on to inspirational insights into the meaning of art, the secrets of the universe and the marvels of the human condition.  And, further, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for an institution like the National Portrait Gallery to allow its director the opportunity to flex his philosophical muscles and occasionally put on a show that attempts to stretch the traditional boundaries of what is thought appropriate to be displayed within the Gallery walls.  Far be it from me to suggest the Gallery should simply stick to have a running programme of sensible, old-fashioned retrospectives of works by painters such as Reynolds, van Dyck and Romney or photographers like Beaton, Karsh and Leibovitz.  But, having said that, I think the decision to twin the above mentioned Mask show with Absent Friends, an exhibition that contains not a single painting that looks anything like what anyone actually imagines a portrait to be, might be seen to be setting a rather unfortunate trend.

Of course, setting up temporary shows like this pair can take quite a lot of tricky long-term logistical planning so I suppose the decision to stage these two shows contemporaneously might just have been a final, radical valedictory fling by the previous director Sandy Nairne.  But since his replacement, Nicholas Cullinan, has been in position just over two years now, it seems more likely that these exhibitions are representative of the thinking behind the new regime and that Cullinan, with one eye on his next move up the great global greasy pole of big museum jobs, has decided to try to make his mark and get noticed by being self-consciously experimental and trendily avant garde.  Which, since his next career move will almost certainly be to some other international Modern Art gallery, is presumably why he’s decided to ignore the brief to bother with exhibitions about portraiture and stage shows that would be far more suited to the confines of somewhere like Tate Modern.

Having said all that, the problem isn’t that Absent Friends contains a particularly feeble or egregious display of artworks.  Far from it, the show is a more than competently staged retrospective of works by Howard Hodgkin and contains many very attractive works to please the eye.  The irritation arises from the fact that the show is displayed in the National Portrait Gallery which then requires the curators to twist themselves into complex casuistical knots trying to assert that the artist’s paintings are somehow portraits when, quite clearly, they are no such thing.  So, while it’s very reasonably stated in the gallery guide that Hodgkin was preoccupied with ‘the role of memory, the expression of emotion and the exploration of relationships’ in his paintings, and that he ‘challenged traditional forms of representation’ it’s just plain daft to then try to extend this and claim he developed ‘a personal visual language of portraiture’.

So, if he didn’t paint portraits, what did this highly respected artist get up to during his long and successful career – a career that rather sadly came to a close during the course of the hanging of this very exhibition?  Well, this satisfyingly comprehensive survey provides a very thorough run through of the artist’s developments as he discovers, refines and develops his very distinctive signature style.  And like most successful artists, Hodgkin created a sort of personal meta-language of signs, shapes and colours that he used to describe the world he saw around him.  At first sight the mix of simple splodges of colour combined with swirls and circles, rectangles and rainbow shapes strike most people as very straightforward works of abstraction, a confection of random forms and tones designed to evoke a range of emotional responses similar to the way that music can sometimes work to inspire feeling of joy, sorrow and all the other stuff in between.  But, as Hodgkin always insisted, in fact the works he created are all of figurative intent – albeit a highly stylised, simplified and edited form – and the shapes are meant to be representative of actual scenes and situations witnessed by the artist.  And for Hodgkin the point of the paintings was to act simply as a kind of aide memoire, helping him to record and recall a series of specific events – the people and their surroundings but mainly the atmosphere and ambience of the occasion.

How well he succeeds in sharing these sights, scenes and moods with his audience is a bit questionable and, frankly, it’s not always (or even very often) easy to relate the paintings to their titles.  But, occasionally everything really does seem to come together.  It takes a bit of trial and error but there were a couple of times going round this show when I stood back at just the right distance, tilted my head at the exactly appropriate angle and squinted with the right degree of strabismatic astigmatism and as the pinks, oranges and greens blurred and the blobs, swooshes and swirls coalesced, I could just about convince myself that I was at Hodgkin’s side and part of his exotic milieu.  And as far as I could tell, he seemed to enjoy a rather agreeable, not to say sybaritic lifestyle, enjoying an endless round of delightful Islington dinner parties where he could engage in witty repartee while sharing a round of After Eight mints; or else relaxing poolside with the heat of the Los Angeles sun alleviated only by the cool of the clinking ice in a margarita cocktail; or maybe dipping his pain au chocolate into an espresso in Venice while the sun glinted off the tiles of some Palazzo or other.  Of course, since Hodgkin’s paintings are so very willfully abstracted into his particular shorthand coding style, I may very well have misinterpreted any or all of the signs and symbols and maybe everyone at the party was sharing a Ferrero Rocher, perhaps the drinks were martinis and the coffee could have been a cappuccino.  Who knows?  I admit that I might well have got the details completely wrong but I’m pretty sure that I got a good sense of the general conviviality.  But what about the other guests and companions at all these events?  Most times I couldn’t even tell what gender they were let alone tell how many there were or what they were wearing or what they looked like.  I’m absolutely sure I wouldn’t be able to pick any of them out at an identity parade.  But then why should I be able to do that?  It’s not as if Hodgkin had set out to paint their portraits.