Issue 14
Visiting and Revisiting Art, etcetera
Highlights include…
Carter Ratcliff and Brice Marden on Rothko
Linda Nochlin, Milan Kundera, John Maybury, Peter Doig and others on Francis Bacon
Beat Wyss on Caspar David Friedrich
Peter Campus and Douglas Gordon in conversation
Sophie Howarth on the school of life
Penelope Curtis on Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
Francesca Pasini on Lucio Fontana’s Structure in Neon
Cildo Meireles and Frederico Morais in conversation
Encounter: Lucy Skaer
And Tishani Doshiin the Tate Archive
Soon after Rothko saw Jaspar Johns’s first show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958 he declared: “We worked for years to get rid of all that.” In 1962 the Sidney Janis Gallery presented ‘The New Realists’, which featured Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist. Rothko was so appalled that he left his dealer, Sidney Janis. As Ratcliff writes, Rothko believed he was “producing an art that would last for 1,000 years.” It was a sentiment that was in stark contrast to the new, brash secularized art emerging in New York.
“For me, realism is an attempt to capture the appearance with the cluster of sensations that the appearance arouses in me…I tried to create an image of the effect that was produced inside me.” Francis Bacon, letter to Michel Leiris, 20 November 1981.
To coincide with the Bacon retrospective at Tate Britain, we bring together people who knew him and people who came to his work through art books or exhibitions – to pay homage to the great figurative painter of the twentieth century.
“How do we inhabit old buildings? How do we imagine the future? Are we part of that future, and how will the passage of time affect the things that buildings house?” Penelope Curtis explores the disorientations and illusions created by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster in her manipulation of space.
“Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea is a metaphor for the defenceless, top-speed collision between the ego and the cosmos, subject and substratum. He challenges us to do as he does without bothering him. We are to stand there and gaze at his painting.” Beat Wyss explores the artist as monk in the “Caspar David Friecrich effect” and German Romanticism of the early nineteenth century.
Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles is regarded as one of the leading figures in the development of Conceptual art. In works that mix the sensorial with the cerebral he explores “physical, geometric, psychological, topographical and anthropological.” He talks to writer and curator Frederico Morais.
Milan Kundera says of Francis Bacon, “his ultimate brutal confrontation is not with a society, with a state, with politics, but with the physiological materiality of man.”
“The character that interests me the most in Gin Lane is the fellow who appears to be dancing a jig while striking himself on the head with a pair of bellows and holding a spike in his other hand with a baby impaled on it.” David Shrigley on William Hogarth.
“It is not a lasso, an arabesque, nor a piece of spaghetti…” Lucio Fontana describes his work Spatial Light – Structure in Neon for the 9th Milan Triennial.
DOUGLAS GORDON “Come to my house for dinner.”
PETER CAMPUS “OK, what night?”
DOUGLAS GORDON “I’m free every Tuesday. We have beef Wellington on Tuesdays.”
TATE ETC. is published three times a year.
Subscribe online at www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/subscribe
Or call +44 (0)20 7887 8959
