Gallery North
After/Nach/D’Apres
(the emulation of genius?)
New attitudes to print- an exhibition of work by a group of international artists using print:
Samar Asamoah, Mandy Bonnell, Alfons Bytautas,
Richard Galloway, Oona Grimes, Mikel Horl, John Hewitt, Chris Jones, Laurent Mathelin, Keith McIntyre,
Steve Mumberson, Pete Nevin, Sue Spark,
Mark Wilson and Bryndis Snaebjornsdottir,
Mick Wootton
February, 2008
A group exhibition curated by Mick Wootton
Originality is a virtue. Plagiarism, so we are told, is a crime. Yet clearly all artists rely on the work of others. Paradoxically, the process of finding one’s identity as an artist, indeed of being an artist, seems to be impossible without constant reference to the work of others.
This indebtedness was explicitly acknowledged in the academies that began to appear all over Europe in the 1700s. Copying the work of the Old Masters was a key part of their teaching. Hence Joshua Reynolds, first president of the British Royal Academy told his students that ‘invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory; nothing can come of nothing.’ And even Goya made careful etchings after the works, in the Royal Collection of his great Spanish forebear, Velasquez.
In the nineteenth century, however, attitudes shifted. Individual experience came to be stressed and young artists were encouraged to find their own subject matter and style. (‘I am the primitive of my own way’, Cézanne was often quoted as saying.) As a result, a new narrative of the artist’s career emerged, one in which the young artist claimed a position of personal strength by first latching onto the work of a venerated precursor and then radically re-interpreting it.
But not now. As has often been remarked, a sense of ‘after-ness’ characterises our times and the world today is full of pictures in various mediums that make no claim to originality but function instead as palimpsests of representations that the artist has found or appropriated. Rauschenberg is often cited in this regard. When Rauschenberg deployed silk-screened images of Rubens’s Venus at her Toilet and Velasquez’s Rokeby Venus in his painting Persimmon (1964) he did not expect the viewer to think he had produced them himself. That may have been true of the aged Picasso when he reworked Velasquez’s Las Meninas or Manet’s Déjeuner Sur l’Herbe. In his case, however, he was simply reproducing images he had found.
So what about the exhibits in after / nach / d’après? What are the implications of the fact that each one refers to (is ‘after’) something by Velasquez, Watteau, Hogarth, Matisse, Cruikshank or someone else less well known? Should we see them as like Rauschenberg’s Persimmon apparently flaunting a lack of originality so as to test the claims of authorship and authenticity that have been so important to modern aesthetics? Or are they like Picasso’s versions of Las Meninas, to be understood as engaging in some kind of oedipal battle with a revered earlier work in order to arrive at something vital and new?
Paul Usherwood