Capturing the Pointless Moment
Some thoughts on art I've seen this week
This week I went to see an exhibition at Tate Modern called Capturing the Moment which pitched itself as exploring ‘the relationship between the brush and the lens, how artists have turned to painting and photography to capture moments in time.’ Sounded intriguing, especially as I’m very interested in thinking about the impact of photography on painting and vice versa. But man alive! what a pointless, drifting exhibition it was.
Now don’t get me wrong, there are some wonderful artworks in it. And if you’re after a concentrated hit of modern and contemporary art then the huge names in this show will do the trick. Artists like Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Alice Neel, Pablo Picasso, Paula Rego, Cecily Brown, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, the list goes on and on. It’s a very impressive collection of artworks in one space. But as an exhibition curated around the theme of the dialogue between painting and photography, it’s just a rather confusing label and I didn’t learn anything, frankly. At £20 a pop for a ticket, it seems to me that it’s just a money spinner for the Tate.
Saying all that, it was worth the ticket price just to discover the American artist Joan Semmel, whose work I hadn’t come across before. This particular painting seems so abstract to me that it took me a long time to work out what I was looking at. It’s called Secret Spaces, and is based on a photograph Semmel took of her own body. I love it, and stood looking at it for ages.
Her work is quite erotic, and some of it has even been interpreted by viewers as pornographic. She describes it as a feminist response to our misogynistic and pornographic Western popular culture because she brings her own perspective to representations of the female body and women’s sexuality.
Semmel was born in 1932, so she’s in her 90s now, and what’s really interesting about her work is that she explores how we relate to the changing nature of the body as we are moving through our lives, from youth, to middle age and then into old age. I found this video of her talking about her own work at a retrospective of her career at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts last year, and it gives a brilliant overview of her work through the years if you want to see more of it:
As always I’d love to know what you think. And please do share links to art that you’ve seen this week.
Yes, agree, not the strongest of exhibitions. I struggled to see the link between some of the pieces shown and the photography theme. I mean it’s full of big names but the story didn’t flow for me. My stand out piece was the portrait by Pauline Boty—she doesn’t get recognition and it was great to see her work in a room of household names.
Hi there, thought-provoking as always - thank you. I wasn't familiar with Semmel's work either. Curious how she went from abstract into figuration. I always wonder how that change occurs. The show, as you said, was filled with a lot of heavy hitters. I don't know that I pay too much attention to a curator's intention (maybe I should...) Can you say more how that affected how you saw the show, the works? If there'd been no curatorial "intention" (some might say, blah blah) would you have viewed it differently - hard to say, I know.