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WELCOME TO THE EAST FINCHLEY OPEN ARTISTS DECEMBER NEWSLETTER
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This Month - Inspirations - The Good, the Bad and Lolo the Donkey - The Built Environment - and more
If you are viewing on gmail remember to click 'display images' and 'view entire message' when you reach the bottom.
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COMING UP AT THE PHOENIX CINEMA FOR THE MONTH OF JANUARY 'INSPIRATIONS' - A NEW EXHIBITION FROM THE EFOA PHOTOGROUP
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January 1st - 31st
Phoenix Cinema,
52 High Road.
London N2
Open half an hour before first performance - usually around lunchtime until end of evening performance
Free entry to foyer
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HIGH ROAD LIVE! is a an initiative by a collective group of local organisations, including East Finchley Open Artists, who are using a grant from Barnet Council to promote the well-being of the High Road with increased community involvement through various projects. Look out next month for more news.
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A cautionary tail
MIKE COLES writes:-
It’s 15th October 2022. I’m in Tesco. My hand reaches out and picks up a can of Campbells Tomato Soup.
Why did I do that? Do I like the soup, was it a cold day and it looked comforting.
Maybe 60 years ago on the 15th October 1962 Andy Warhol also reached out and picked up the same soup. Maybe that association was on my mind – was picking up the soup was an act of free will or pre-determined? – concepts that have bothered philosophers, mathematicians, scientists since the time of Plato. I'm pretty sure that both Andy’s and my actions were already determined - the idea that if the stars are aligned and you knew the position of every molecule in the universe all future actions and interactions can be predicted (if you had a big enough computer!). This is all very heady, but let’s go back to Andy in the supermart. What was really on his mind with the soup can in his hand?
He was a successful graphic designer in New York but saw himself more as a ‘artist’. He was unknown at the time in the art world, but the concept of using icons of popular culture to make paintings had been around for a while. (Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, had started the ball rolling from 1955 in the move away from abstract expressionism into what became ‘pop art’).
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When Warhol chose this can of soup was he just taking forward an art movement that was forming – just an arbitrary cog in the wheel of art movements? Or did he see soup tin posters as a money-making opportunity? Did he just fancy some tomato soup and had the painting idea later? Was he high on drugs and was just responding to a whim?
I can’t find any coherent explanation from him about how this original Campbells soup tin painting came about, but when exhibited in Los Angeles it became an iconic work and led to Warhol being internationally recognised.
Hold on for a minute!
We can except that Warhol left the supermart went back to his studio and made the painting but how did it even get into an exhibition in the first place to give it the opportunity to be significant?
And so we come to the gatekeepers.
So, Warhol has his painting done – is it good or bad or something in between? When it comes to judging art the two polar opposites might be 1) art historians and critics, who have a holistic view of all art and can contextualise any new art and can promote or debunk its ‘value’ in terms of that knowledge, or 2) the man on the street who, with no particular specialized knowledge, ‘knows what he likes’ It’s probably more accurate to say he knows what he likes from what’s offered up to him as ‘good’ art.
So to make his mark Warhol had to influence the gatekeepers, art critics, gallery curators and patrons. For the Campbells soup tin, luckily for him, in the gatekeepers world, the stars and the molecules were aligned.
Gatekeepers deal with aesthetics which can be defined as the perception, interpretation, and appreciation of ‘beauty’. In the presence of ‘beautiful things’, we apparently feel a broad range of emotions, such as fascination, awe, wonder, admiration etc. Whether any of these qualities were in the mind of art critics at the time, or whether it was commercial considerations, we don’t know but Warhol’s soup tin painting, (and maybe his lifestyle and/or his eccentricity), brought him that exhibition in Los Angeles and his head start to professional and commercial success. Another time and another place and we may never had heard of him.
Nowadays Campbells Soup is regarded as one of the key works of art of the 20th century, but at the time some critics thought it was decorative rubbish – of no intellectual value (which probably pleased Warhol), but enough, or the right ones, thought it was ‘good’ (enough) and in the end Warhol’s success prevailed - but good or bad, it still depended on the gatekeepers because public recognition of any art gives it a monetary value which contributes (reinforces) its perceived ‘importance’.
However, critics and the establishment haven’t always got their own way.
Let’s go back to 1910 and we are in Paris at the Salon des Independants.
The Salon des Independants is the annual art exhibition of the Societe des Artistes Independants, which has been held in Paris since 1884, originally launched in opposition to the rigid submission policy of the official Salon.
Formal academic salons still dominated the art world in France in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as places of commerce, patronage, and criticism. (The values of aristocratic and bourgeois society were reflected in the ‘beauty, harmony, and order’ of academic style paintings). Pompous and self-serving, it was a monopolistic structure organized by the Societe des Artistes Francais.
The Salon des Independants, however, aimed to showcase the type of avant-garde art of which the official Salon disapproved. (For instance, Cubism - which came in 1911). Based on ideas of freedom, independence, and individualism, there were no judges or juried awards, and the exhibition was theoretically open to anyone.
Roland Dorgelès was a writer, critic, painter, and journalist.
(He later became famous for his Post WW1 book “Les croix de bois” ‘The Wooden Crosses’ (He enlisted in the infantry on August 1, 1914 and at the front, he scrupulously noted everything he saw, with the precise objective of writing “a true novel about the war.”)
But in 1909, tired of being considered a bad painter, by the snobbish Parisian art critics, Dorgeles had an interesting idea - he thought the gatekeepers and the art establishment were due for a bit of come-uppance.
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Et le soleil s’endormit sur l’Adriatique, (Sunset Over the Adriatic) by Lolo
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At the 1910 show of the Salon des Independants, a messy, muddled painting of a sunset over the sea was exhibited. Titled Et le soleil s’endormit sur l’Adriatique, (Sunset Over the Adriatic), the picture was presented by the artist Joachim-Raphaël Boronali from Genoa, and was said to be a part of the “Excessivist” movement. The excessive movement came with an exotic manifesto:
"Oh! Excessive great painters, my brothers. Oh! brushes renovators. Let's break those archaic palettes and let's create the principles of tomorrow's painting. Our formula will be the excessivism. Excess in art is a force. The sun is never too ardent, the sky never too green, and the sea too red. Make place to the genius of glare! Let's devastate museums, and trample on routines. Let's make a bonfire with the masterpieces. Don't let us be moved by the yelping of the skinned ferret who are dying under the dome.... let’s live scarlet and purple! All our streams of blood to recolour faded auroras! Warm up the art in the embrace of our smoking arm!"
The Excessivist movement did not exist, and neither did Boronali. Both were the invention of Roland Dorgelès. With a few friends he attached a paintbrush to the tail of a donkey named Lolo, a mascot and entertainer of sorts kept at a Montmartre bar called Le Lapin Agile.
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Montmartre at the time, a downbeat district on a hill in Northern Paris, was a hotbed of ribald cabarets, anarchists, artists, bars, prostitutes, pranksters and radicals.
The scene for this type of prank had been set years before by Georges Fragerolle (born on 1855 in Paris). He was the son of wealthy merchants who studied literature at the Collège Rollin and obtained a degree in law. Against the advice of his parents, he devoted himself to opera, but, despite his best efforts, failed to obtain admission to the Conservatoire de Paris. Knowing his work was more worthy than most, and feeling he was the subject of ‘gatekeeper’ prejudice, revenge was on his mind.
Fragerolle joined the ‘Hydropathes’ around 1878. They were a whimsical group of artists, poets and students united in their love of words – and their dislike of water – who met up every Friday evening in a café in the Latin Quarter. Led by the author and poet Emile Goudeau, this club of revellers and thinkers would recite poetry, comment on the latest literary news and play music. In May 1880 Fragerolle published an article on "Fumisme". "Fumisme" is a system of elaborate hoaxes used to expose hypocrites and deflate the pompous – (we think we know who he had in mind) - It was a favourite practise of the Hydropathes members.
But back to Montmartre 25 years later. Lolo the donkey belonged to Frédéric Gérard, the kindly and eccentric proprietor of Le Lapin Agile, a Montmartre cabaret and bar frequented by artists and intellectuals, including Picasso, who lived around the corner, Modigliani, Charlie Chaplin, Hemingway and many others. In 1880, André Gill painted a large signboard for the establishment that featured an anthropomorphised rabbit jumping out of a pan while deftly balancing a bottle of wine on his paw. Patrons admired it because it was an example of a ‘non-academic lowbrow image’. The counterculture attitude fomenting in Montmartre at the time made a point to elevate low culture like the Lapin Agile signboard to masterpiece status as a way of registering disdain for the prevailing hierarchies of high culture.
And so in 1909 Lolo the donkey (“Joachim-Raphaël Boronali from Genoa”), painted Sunset Over the Adriatic with brush attached to its tail under this very sign. Apparently every time it was given a carrot it made a vigorous new mark.
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left: The Lapin Agile sign right: Lolo painting 'Sunset over the Adriatic' - second from the right in the group of masked men is Pablo Picasso
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With no-one any the wiser, after the 1910 Salon des Independants exhibition, a lot of people wanted to meet this new mysterious Italian Artist, especially journalists and art critics, impressed by his emerging talent. But the ‘painter’ remained elusive.
Finally after a few weeks, Dorgelès visited the editor of the French Newspaper, "l'illustration” and revealed the truth. He stated that the artwork was just a hoax, He revealed that the painter was Lolo the donkey, and showed a picture of the donkey (above) with the brush on its tail making the painting. Dorgelès explained his motivation was "To show to the simpletons, the vains and incapables who clutter most of the art shows, that according to them, the work of a donkey, brushed with its tail is not misplaced in a great art exhibition, sharing the space with "real" art works! "
So did the hoax work? Before the true painter of ‘Adriatic Sunset’ was exposed it received critical acclaim. The painter and sculptor André Maillos bought the painting for 20 Louis (400 gold francs - equivalent to £4500 in 2020) In 1953, the art collector Paul Bédu acquired the painting and today it’s on show in The Cultural Space Paul Bédu at Milly la Forêt, a town just south of Paris.
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The affair aroused considerable controversy but other than a footnote in Montmartre history Lolo never became an artistic icon, but in some small way opened the possibility of Dada and works like Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’. A porcelain urinal bought from a French hardware shop and signed R Mutt, it was critically accepted and made concept art acceptable. ‘Fountain’ was selected in 2004 as "the most influential artwork of the 20th century" by 500 well known artists and historians.
Interestingly Fountain was at first rejected when submitted to the exhibition of the New York Society of Independent Artists, which Duchamps helped to found, on the grounds of decency.
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The exhibition, just like Salon des Indépendants in Paris, was supposed to be open to any artist
In some ways, Sunset Over the Adriatic and Fountain are two jokes with the same punch line. These open, democratic salons, however well meaning, couldn’t really be open to everything. The impulse of fumisme and later Dada was to poke and prod and offend until the invisible borders of decorum and good taste were revealed. Lolo accomplished this by having his artwork accepted to the salon. Duchamp, repeating the prank seven years later, made much the same point when his artwork was rejected
So, by Warhol’s time the concept of good or bad had become very muddled but the ‘gatekeepers’ still exerted considerable influence in getting work exhibited. So their seal of approval (or finding a sponsor - often commercially motivated), remained vital – and still does to this day.
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POSTSCRIPT
In 2005 Bristol Graffiti-artist Banksy surreptitiously hung one of his own paintings, a Warhol-style picture of a Tesco soup can, in New York's Museum of Modern Art.
It remained there undetected for three days before the museum took it down. On the same day, Banksy also hung his own work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Brooklyn Museum.
Banksy later explained, "I thought some of the paintings were quite good. That's why I thought, you know, put them in a gallery."
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The built environment can be beautiful and inspirational, but over time tastes can change and not all architects have the same kind of vision - sometimes functionality gets in the way. Here's what we mean...
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The EFOA Winter Fair was a great success and we have been able to donate £1,000 to our Charity of the Year - the Wave Cafe
Wave Café, a friendly, inclusive café with drop-in art activities, is a social enterprise set up to bring people with and without learning disabilities together and to help build a truly inclusive community.
Wave Café Muswell Hill London N10
https://www.wavecafe.org/
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ABOUT EAST FINCHLEY OPEN ARTISTS
Find out about us on our website www.eastfinchleyopen.org.uk
There you will find details of all our current members plus photo's of their work and contact details plus information on recent and upcoming exhibitions
MEMBERSHIP: If you are interested in joining East Finchley Open Artists please contact the Membership Secretary at membership@eastfinchleyopen.org.uk
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