All unnecessary

Walking down the Broadway, I bumped into a fellow artist. I had seen his work on the wall of another artist recently, I mentioned to him. Metal rods, the white spaces of positive and negative, described a fish twisting or jumping, but there was something architectural about it, exploratory, playful, confident at the same time. Lovely. That lust - that desire - the "I wants" I call it, grabbed me when I saw that piece. It doesn't happen very often. Well, I politely told him I had seen his work and that I had liked it. 

Then he mentioned that John at Atelier Gallery had recently acquired an Eduardo Paolozzi. I hastily made my excuses (how rude) and a beeline for Atelier, I was itching to see this work. John has superb taste, everything he has is always desirable. If you have no taste, go to Atelier and let John hang art on your walls, furnish your home and give you that lust for life and beauty. If you have taste, you'll have died and gone to heaven at Atelier.

John has an eye. Not many people have it. One other artist I know has a visual literacy and impartiality to measure, judge, assess and and then move on from whatever it is she happens to be presented with at the time, and then becomes totally blindsided by her own work and gets "all unnecessary": that's what we call it here in Essex; in Ireland you'd be told to get a grip; in Northern Ireland, catch yourself on. That's what I had to do, looking at John's considerable and desirable collection.

Interestingly, John told me a story about a significant investment he was considering. What made his decision was that he didn't like the person who currently held that piece, and it swayed him into not investing. An emotional decision - his to make, and much more common than we are prepared to admit, it's human nature. This desire for the ownership of beauty is sometimes about who delivers it, as much as we don't want it to be emotional, that cool elusive eye escaped. In contrast: another artist who inferred that being An Artist was a blank cheque to be as indiscriminate as one likes with emotion in one's work. I didn't like that at all and yet she produces some technically graceful work, even if it is scattered with the remnants of sentimentalism. Shame to let loose the 'all unnecessary'. Get a grip. Catch yourself on.

That cool impartiality is more than a gift or talent, it's something else: to make ordinance, to size, summate, and yet have that passionate feeling, that gutteral instinct for form, material, balance, surface, sometimes function, the butteriness of a brushstroke, the fineness of inset stones, the very stuffness of a thing. It's the hallmark of a collector for me, a superb art dealer, and for an artist, an inner strength and control to bend emotion to become subservient to the purpose of the object, the reason d'etre, the rhyme and reason of a thing. Totally necessary, and the pursuit and ownership of beauty? A total necessity.

it's DARK @ CoExist Gallery

We're talking about some wacky bloke she met, and how inscrutable and exclusive he seemed to be: doggy style, apparently, he had tiddled on his lamposts and marked his territory as 'Modern' and 'Stuckist', marking his little plot in the great terrain of the visual arts. I hope that's all the doggy style he'll get, too.

Rather than announce - pronounce - one's artistic GPS, some souls send up a flare - and there were several this evening. Not being familiar on video installation, I was shown what it could be: two pieces particularly struck me: Semiconductors' Black Rain, the most beautiful imagery of solar winds, and I don't use the word beautiful at all lightly: there is no greater achievement. And it had a hypnotic beauty, black and white, the abstractions of eclipses like the patterning of an iris, the trajectory of the missile from this NASA footage, and rain, or Coronal Mass Ejections giving an eternal sense of space and weightless time. Is that beauty in the eye of the beholder, or in my perception, or worst, in my taste? I don't think so: others flopped onto the beanbags, the static softness within the boundaries of audability cushioning and enveloping this space. The last time I saw art change people was in The Weather Project (you remember Eliassons Sunset at the Tate) with people lolling on the floor. Amazing.

DARK, curated by Michaela Freeman, was as stylish as the little black dress she wore with ease and panache this evening. Here's what it can be: engaging, hypnotic, cleanly and stylishly executed. John Smiths' 'The Black Tower', 1984, was mystifying to me: eventually, he was talking about death. Spare - spartan - concise, lightly humorous, staring at things, bits of place, our minds are engaged in a preoccupation, while staring at what is in front of us with apparently no comprehension. Saddening, but the pragmatism and gentleness that constructs this narrative has that touch of humour: we are shown the colour of the sky, of his porridge, of the bits and pieces of his mechanics of his daily life, and his doppelganger in the form of a black building, the notion of death in the peripheral vision, now brought to the fore, into consciousness. In Ireland, we'd put that on the National Curriculum: it's all about growing up, finally realising the finity of self, the drawing together, the drawing in of the day.

And tomorrow, I'll go back. Josh Langan, less a flare and more a live wire buzzing with static (watch this space) - I couldn't see his work for the amount of bodies at this Private View, I couldn't get a seat in Susan Francis' installation, and I didn't get time to absorb Lemeh42's work. Here's to a success, here's to what it can be, here's to style. Bravo.

Pin the Tale on the Donkey

We're on the phone arranging to take work to a show in a month or two, and he voiced a concern about a fellow practitioner. What was contemporary about the work he had seen just recently?

For craft practitioners, the material and it's expression comes first, quite often in a functional way, and to defunctionalise that crafted object is a breed of "art" that has spawned the 'neither this nor that' offspring, but we are made to contemplate aforesaid offspring, because if we don't, we're heathens. No wonder at some of the dumbstruck silence that pervades. The pursuit of beauty has many poor relations, cruelly and unfortunately. Cristín Leach, the eminent Irish critic, recently wrote an article about the Summer Degree shows at NCAD, and to her, it's maybe a matter of marrying craft skill to concept: few of those artists will survive, breed, but we'll have a new landscape in which to wander. For those with skill and no concept, as Bill Bryson ignominiously commented on Norwegian television "It gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience", as beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty, that Scarlet Pimpernel, elusive and undefined. And for those with concept and no skill, pass the planks and hammer.

But it's easy to get bogged down in the craft of the matter, for those who are so inclined. Rather than raise one's head above the parapet, and comment on the wider arena, in the same way that one raises a wet finger to see which way it's blowing, it's far easier to stick it in the mud and Carry On Regardless. Is it important to create new art that is relevant, refreshing, innovative and engaging? To carry on the conversation of art, an artist's practice within the big picture, the vista, the landscape...?

I went to Rainham Marshes recently, and I know nothing of birds, at all. Still a fabulous sight to see, and I can understand the endless enthusiasm for spotting and classifying birds, albeit through a long lense: give me that long lense and I'll happily spot the lesser warbled artist stuck in the grassroots or feminist '70's, the glam '80's glitteriness of style without substance, and then the conceptualisation of the artist (by merit of signing their work) to the hastily bashed together planks of wood with the indescribably poetic yet fundamental profundity of hot air. The Emperors clothes. That's pretty scathing: all of this art is known to have validity, but I'd like to open the newspaper and then look at the stuff on the wall and imagine these things have a knowingness of each other. But this isn't fashion, for me, it's about animals, and to pin the tale on the donkey, we need prior visual memory of aforesaid donkey, aim for it's arse and give it the Tale it's asked for.