Contemporary Art

Thinking about Damien Hirst recently brought back to me memories of a seminar on Young British Art back in the 1990s and how at that time the question of contemporary art was raised, implying that YBA was indeed contemporary. Even then I felt that being contemporary is not an issue that would interest me in art. Thinking about the possible implications today I get the idea that contemporary rather transports the view of something that is up-to-date, can be understood by anybody and therefore could be inevitably dull as an outcome. It is possible that it offers no further vision than just a place in time, maybe interesting for some historian. So from the viewpoint of a possible art history - if there was something like this at all :D - inhabiting just this historic point - and probably nothing else...Yet some decades before we had the idea of an Avantgarde in art...


My answer at the time on the question of contamporaneity was with Thierry de Cordier: "I'm not interested in the 20th century." And the artist I felt obliged to discuss - though he was not part of YBA and had been regretfully dead already - was Derek Jarman and above all his garden, something that from the outset would be liable to change its look constantly.

Nightwatching material II

The opening scene and its follow-up reminded me also of Derek Jarman, first of all of his overwhelming movie "Blue", something I could not bear watching in one sitting because as a predominantly visual person myself, somebody who has studied painting, I know how much it hurts to have taken away the capacity to see from oneself. So first reference Blue

And then in the second scene when talking with Hendrikje about colours, I was reminded of Jarman's book Chroma, which I recomment to any painter because of its insight into the matter of colour.

Cover of the English edition

Cover of the German edition

I read this book as a preparation for a talk I delivered on Derek Jarman's Garden at my academy.