Humour for art's sake

>> >> Matthew Collings' This Is Modern Art is sassy, good fun

by JULIET WATERS

Matthew Collings describes the afternoon when he was looking for a piece of art to put on the cover of his book, This Is Modern Art: "The sun was shining over Hoxton Square in London's East End. The sky was blue. The square was leafy. The buildings were picturesque. The air was buzzing with creativity and irony.

Everybody was an artist." Hence the title. Because if everyone is an artist, it logically follows that everything is art, including this book. The cover he did eventually choose wasn't a piece of art but a picture of himself looking into a concave mirror: the gallery as fun house with the critic as quizzical narcissist. Based on a Channel 4 documentary Collings narrated a few years ago at the height of cool Britannia, This Is Modern Art has the slightly dated aura of '90s self-consciousness: short paragraphs and bold break lines: "geniuses R us," "arms," "more arms," "are drips wrong?" "life," "death," "'80s furniture." Artists' bios hang in the margins like hip tombstones.

What saves this book from the spectre of glibness is Matthew Collings himself. Very new Modern art has become a little too cool and popular for its own good, he admits. Young British artists like Tracy Emin stare out of ads for Blue Sapphire gin. Vanity Fair profiles six Manhattan artists who all look like models for the Gap. But if Collings is any example, art criticism at least is more charming, insightful, provocative and authentically funny than it's ever been.

Every chapter in this book is fun to read as Collings contextualizes contemporary art by examining five main issues in the history of modern art: the myth of genius; the role of the artist to horrify and shock; loveliness vs. ugliness; existential emptiness; and Modern art's too often lame, ironic sense of humour.

He poses questions like whether or not Monet was "really a ridiculous snob and a sugary minded moron?" then answers them wistfully "that's his image now and we have to live with it--the Queen Mother of Impressionism." He lines ups icons for our consideration: "Picasso is Gauloise, Pollock is

Marlboro, but Warhol is the pure concept of the brand name without even the necessity for cigarettes." And he sums up the here and now quite nicely: "Art is getting more and more relaxed into everything else because everything else is changing and there is no certainty or centre or official ideas that everyone must obey. New ideas are everyone's ideas now, not just art's. We go around with a troubled look though because hell is near."

Collings is opinionated, but contagiously open-minded in the face of every trend and every artist. Only once does he actually trash anything. Even then he's actually trashing the critics: "...the turgid, bad, unobservant, terrible writing about [American video artist Bill Viola] which is always appearing everywhere can be quite amazing, like an inadvertent parody of art culture. There it will be in the New York Review of Books, say, in an article about why Modern art museums are like places of religious contemplation, and how Bill Viola is like St. Thomas Aquinas, right next to articles by intelligent writers about interesting subjects."

By the time one has finished this authoritative, though irreverent, 300-page primer on Modern art, Collings has touched on close to 100 artists from the last century--Matisse, Goya, Mondrian, Klimt, Munch, Paul McCarthy, Damien Hirst, Gilbert and George, Sarah Lucas , Cindy Sherman, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Chris Ofili, Sean Landers to name only a fraction.

But more importantly, he inspires an affection for Modern art that your average reader probably wouldn't have imagined possible. "However suspicious and blank and empty and ironic and repetitious contemporary art might be, hope is always here. Or some nice greys or something. Hope, marvels, beauty, a route to transcendent meaning, a few laughs." And in the case of this book, a few very good laughs.

This is Modern Art, by Matthew Collings, Seven Dials, pb, 271pp, $29.95