2013-04-21: Artsy-fartsy pretentious tripe

Last year Mr Mo and I went to “Gallery Weekend Berlin” on the last weekend in April. We ended up visiting quite a few galleries in several different locations around central Berlin (“Mitte”) — many in repurposed factories. (I think I took a fair number of photos, but it seems that they were among those that didn’t get backed up before my laptop was stolen, alas. I will have to ask Mr Mo if he took some.)

Anyway, what prompts this little entry is the explanatory sheet that we were given about a particular artist’s work, which also came with another sheet showing thumbnails and the dimensions of the paintings on display. Gosh. About the best I can say is that I didn’t despise Michael Williams’ “This Means Something to My Horse” exhibit as much as I totally hate most of Cy Twombly’s stuff, but it was a clear runner-up.† Here is the amazingly creative, best-face-on-it description of his work: 

Michael Williams paints the uncanny, with a tendency toward the outright ludicrous. (‘Ludicrous’ — got that part right.) His colorful, large-scale paintings combine automatic (read: ‘unplanned’) drawing, images appropriated from thrift store finds and discarded pictures(!!), and an array of abstract forms and gestures, all rendered with a freely diverse range of painterly techniques. Often beginning with thin, doodle-like drawings made with an airbrush, Williams layers his canvases with glazes or denser passages of paint squeezed from the tube or slathered with a knife, creating a surreal optical disorientation and depth. (Polite way of saying “an incoherent mess.’) Williams’ inventive approach to painting and his idiosyncratic visual vocabulary recall the visceral, sun-bleached narratives of Don Van Vliet or Sigmar Polke’s 70s psychedelia, exploring with wit and humor the boundaries of the strange and familiar.

A hallmark of poor art for me is how much curator blathering is required to convince people that what they’re seeing is truly art, instead of trusting their own crap-meters. As with Twombly’s scribbles, I am amazed that anyone takes this sort of “art” seriously at all. (Fine, fine, chalk this all up to jealousy on my part. — I’d have more to be jealous about if I were actually producing more art and trying and failing to get noticed, of course.)

† OK, fine, there are a few pieces of Williams’ that I actually kind of like — e.g., “Do you need it with mustard?” (Alas, the link to the thumbnails page for the exhibit no longer works, so “judge for yourself” no longer applies, though I’ve now found a link to a mention + illustrations.)

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