October 2, 2019 – April 5, 2020
Bankside, London SE1 9TG
tate.org.uk

American exceptionalism is a very real phenomenon, but it far too often obscures a British exceptionalism and a very British obliviousness to history. Whereas America is notorious around the world for its geography skills, that antagonism of history – crystallised through the struggles for civil rights – has long been in the public consciousness, however unwelcome it might be. Few people in Britain are so keenly aware of their own country’s actions, of Oliver Cromwell’s massacres in Ireland (in Britain he’s instead remembered for banning mince pies), of the East India Company, of the Opium Wars, of dividing and redividing the world according to its designs. 

Entering Tate Modern and being greeted, in the distance, by Walker’s Fons Americanus (2019) – the 2019 Hyundai Commission for the Hall – is almost overwhelming. In the Turbine Hall you’re first met with Shell Grotto (2019), a large, water-borne shell, reminiscent of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1486), standing at the front of the Hall. But the goddess herself is absent, and instead a young boy’s head is overcome by waves at the shell’s bottom as he gazes into the sky; instead of the contained swirl of water that circles the shell and the feet of Venus in Botticelli’s painting, there is a boy drowning with tears running down his face.

Venus, absent from her stage, is at the head of Fons Americanus itself, at the back of the Turbine Hall. Whereas on top of the Victoria Memorial, which informed Walker’s piece, is a gilded personification of victory, wings and all, above a seated statue of Victoria herself flanked by truth and justice, here Venus is throwing back her arms and baring her breasts as water flows from them as easily as from her neck – downward past a caricature of Victoria flanked by a hanging tree, a ship’s captain, and a slaver. As a gift “to the heart of an Empire that redirected the fates of the world,” the didactic accompanying the 42-foot-tall statue reads, it not only “redirected the fates of the world” but also sharks’ migratory patterns to follow the British slave ships of the Middle Passage. 

“This is a piece about the oceans and seas, traversed fatally,” says Walker in her profile for the Tate, as an allegory of the Black Atlantic. And so, in the first of the two pools at the bottom of the fountain beneath Victoria and the slavers, instead of the proud bows of ships at the base of the Victoria Memorial we see sharks encircling slaves as they struggle to stay afloat. 

The lowest level of the fountain is sparser, with fewer figures. Here the sculptures are more expressionistic, with one figure resembling a Kathe Kollwitz woodcutting through its distress and mournfulness; another has a face that mirrors the anguish of Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893), as it’s hounded and harassed by a figure with a haircut suspiciously similar to Donald Trump’s. But Trump is only a small part of the fountain, as much as he is a small part of US and British imperialism.

Rianna Jade Parker, writing in ARTnews, is right in asking whether British artists would be commissioned on such a project, and be given the same resources and international stage that is granted to an American artist here – recalling that Boris Johnson’s promise in 2008 for a bronze statue memorializing the victims of British slavery went unfulfilled. Would another work by a British artist be more nuanced than Walker’s Fons Americanus, she asks, highlighting Walker’s misunderstanding of British history when Walker says slavery never happened on British soil – even failing to recognize the Tate’s own foundations that were built on slavery, and so failing to meet the criteria of the Hyundai commission that is to create a site-specific work for the Tate’s Turbine Hall. Had a British artist been commissioned to undertake this project, Parker writes, it would have been an opportunity to build and publicize a British discourse around race and slavery that is distinct from the American experience. But Walker herself deserves more credit.

Rather than an “an unnuanced portrayal of a subject Walker doesn’t know enough about,” as Parker claims, Walker recognizes the function of monuments and memorials beyond their official purpose. In discussing the forgettability of monuments, Walker describes first seeing the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace on her way to the airport, taking photographs in passing, and then promptly forgetting about it. “There’s this very peculiar quality that they have of being completely invisible,” she tells the Tate in a promotional video. “The larger they are, in fact, the more they sink into the background.”

And so Walker’s monument, contrary to Parker’s claim, does “what any good statue should – deal with its site and the context surrounding it.” Rather than adding another monument into the public that sits beside those like the Victoria Memorial, Nelson’s Column, or the Diana Memorial Fountain, any monument sanctioned by a British government that is headed by a notorious racist and which still fails to address basic inequality would have rung hollow. And so this is not a “counter” memorial but a negative memorial, a memorial to that failure and unfulfilled promise. When Parker “wonders whether a more introspective version of the monument was possible – and whether Walker was the right person for the job at all,” this refusal to have another memorial sit alongside them is this introspection. 

Walker’s monument then isn’t one that demands that it’s understood, but recognizes – however unjustly – its place in the British psyche. Slavery is thought as a purely American phenomenon that sullies that nation’s history, and which the US must still contend with. Britain instead celebrates its having ended slavery sooner than the US, without, of course, acknowledging its pivotal role in the American slave trade in the first place – and not to mention that its ships were still transporting slaves even after slavery itself was made illegal. It’s seen as an exclusively American problem; a novelty import from America that sits beside all its other cultural artefacts that gives us films about slavery as readily as Mad Men (2007–2015).  

Fons Americanus is a monument against this novelty of the British attitude towards slavery, that recognizes the intransigence of many of its viewers and the history of the country it exists in, presenting, as the didactic reads, “the Citizens of the Old World” and “The Monumental Misrememberings Of Colonial Exploits” in a way that putting a traditional monument a mile down the road from the Victoria Memorial could never achieve.

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The April 3 detention of internationally celebrated artist Ai Weiwei by the Chinese Government is a matter of increasing concern and indignation in the global art community.  artcritical applauds the leadership of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and other institutions working for his release and urges readers both to sign their online petition and to join protests, called by others for Sunday April 17 at 1pm at embassies and consulates of the People’s Republic around the world.

The petition is accompanied by a statement we fully endorse: “We members of the international arts community express our concern for Ai’s freedom and disappointment in China’s reluctance to live up to its promise to nurture creativity and independent thought, the keys to ‘soft power’ and cultural influence.’’

It is especially galling to see the artistic adviser to the 2008 Beijing Olympics arrested amongst hundreds of lawyers, activists and ordinary citizens in a crackdown clearly intended to stifle any spread of Jasmine revolution to China.  The charge of “economic crimes” cuts no muster, for Ai’s woes with the authorities are longstanding and political.  They are said to date back to the artist’s courageous stance on the Sichuan earthquake and its aftermath, and have already included the extraordinary spectacle of the government-ordered demolition of his landmark Shanghai studio.

While these actions are appalling, they also powerfully vindicate the idea that art and artists can actually matter in the minds of governments and the hearts of protesters.  China needs to get the message that persecuting its most high-profile artist directly undermines its Olympic glory.

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CY TWOMBLY: Cycles and Seasons

Tate Modern, London until September 14 (Bankside, London, 020 7887 8888).

The magnificent retrospective of veteran American artist Cy Twombly at London’s Tate Modern is a bracing reminder that, before all else, painting is smearing and drawing is scribble. In his handling, informality can border on the infantile in its extremes of slightness and scatter.

This show, which is curated by Tate’s director Sir Nicholas Serota, travels to the Bilbao Guggenheim in the fall and then Rome’s National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, and is the first major survey since the artist’s retrospective 15 years ago at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Mr. Twombly, who turned 80 this year, makes big, intellectually ambitious paintings and elemental sculptures that are complex in their interaction with other art and artforms. But he never lets us lose sight of art’s simplest instincts and manuvers, almost taunting the viewer with the base, raw impulses he lets loose.

His art embraces contradiction. In room after room, this survey offers spare yet dynamic canvases, or cruddy yet evocative sculpture. However nonchalant his painterly marks may seem, they are somehow taut and expressive nonetheless. Almost scatological in their oozing and dribbling, his paintings are unfailingly elegant.

There is also a dichotomy in Mr. Twombly’s work between the verbal and the non-verbal: Writing is key to his work — often there is text scribbled into his canvases, and titles manifest connections with poetry — but equally vital is a sense that splodges and gestures form an arcane system of pre-verbal expression.

This juggling act, sustained over half a century, is essential to Mr. Twombly’s achievement. But it also accounts for his rocky ride in terms of esteem. Because he taps reserves of brutalism and classicism in equal measure, he is apt to appear too effete to one camp, too grubby to the other. And the combination of rough textures and smooth literary reference may well account for his greater success in Europe than America.

And yet, the Americanness of Mr. Twombly’s influences and ambition are as striking as his European refinement. Art historically speaking, he was the kid brother of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns — he was Rauschenberg’s classmate at Black Mountain College, the legendary North Carolina experimental art college, and later his traveling companion and studio mate — offering a similar kind of cool, deconstructive coda to Abstract Expressionism. Early canvases in this show, such as “Criticism” (1955) with its graffiti-like scratching on white house paint were named at random in studio games with Johns and Rauschenberg.

In contrast to these peers, however, Mr. Twombly is more an extender than an ender of the AbEx tradition: He literalized the metaphor of handwriting in the free flowing drips of Jackson Pollock. His work also bears a striking affinity with the late work of Arshile Gorky in the way it joins drawing and painting, each at its most elemental, on the canvas.

From the outset, Mr. Twombly’s touch is unmistakable, and the way he sustains informality on a large scale is prodigious. What is very striking about this show, however, is the diversity of his oeuvre. He anticipates or responds to major stylistic shifts of the last half-century while also retaining his personal idiom.

This is another of his contradictions. He is clearly a fearless individualist, and yet at crucial junctures he seems to have been open to criticism and willing to be swayed. When his opulent, indulgent painterly works from the early 1960s, described as “baroque” and made in borrowed studios in Italy, were dismissed by the Minimal artists who held sway at that time in New York, Mr. Twombly capitulated to the criticism and returned to the austerity and monochrome of his 1950s abstraction. The pair of massive, multi-paneled canvases titled “Treatise on the Veil” (1968 and 1970) resemble schoolroom chalkboards — the earlier version has a painterly, all-over black ground in oil based house paint, with markings in white wax crayon sketching out rectangular forms with what look like hastily written calculations and instructions charting a horizontal line towards the bottom of the composition. These minimal works, described in the catalog as an ellipse within the exhibition, could equally be said to hinge the expressive abundance of the works that preceded and followed.

For soon Mr. Twombly was back on form, indulging his penchant for combining writing and primordial marks in compositions of bombastic lyricism. “Hero and Leandro” (1981–84), a painting in three separate panels, evokes the tragic tale of the drowned lovers in a downward rush of brushmarks that alternate between washed out and globular, fluent and agitated. The name “Leandro” is scrawled with a defiant pity that follows the flow. There is a strong acknowledgement of JMW Turner in the palette and application.

Exalted citations of poetry and classical myth were to prove a compelling influence on the emerging new expressionists of the 1980s such as Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente, and Anselm Kiefer. It is around this time that Mr. Twombly secured his modern master status in the art world.

A sumptuous work, “Untitled (A Painting in 9 Parts)” (1988), represents the artist at his most traditional looking, bordering on the Rococo. Shown in the Italy Pavillion of the 1988 Venice Biennale, these paintings, on wood panels, inscribe verses of Rilke in Monet-like feathery and washy applications of oil paint and watercolor in watery greens and whites. Two of the panels are elaborately shaped in a way that recalls 18th century Venetian artists such as Tiepolo.

But in the 1990s the artist pulled back from this decadent-seeming extreme to reconnect with a more modernist impulse. His “Four Season” cycle (1993–94) explores a lexicon of shapes appropriate to each season, with barely legible tracings of Keat’s Poem, the Human Seasons (1818) as textual and textural counterpart to these bright colors and expressive gestures.

Mr. Twombly’s sculpture has been a significant part of his output from the beginning of his career, with a break in production between 1959 and 1976. Made from found objects, which are sometimes cast in bronze, they are typically coated in roughly applied white paint, and they, too, often have writing scribbled into the surfaces. They find the artist in his most archaic mode, and emphasize the brutal, primitive aspect of classicism, as opposed to its refinement. Tomb-like forms like “Untitled (In Memory of Alvaro De Campos)” (2002) are at once elegiac and elemental.

The show ends with a riot of color and a lyricism with the “Bacchus” (2005) series. These mammoth canvases reconnect with the pre-scriptural scratched abstractions of the 1950s while distilling the artist’s lifelong engagement with poetry and myth. In a rich red that hovers between wine and blood, evoking Homer’s “wine dark sea,” these great all-over dripping loops of thick, bold line are marvelously poised between tension and fluency, a final coming together of the artist’s competing impulses to inscribe and describe, to record and to let go.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 17, 2008, under the heading “Smears, Scribbles and Scratches: Twombly at the Tate Modern”

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