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On the Sunday I looked in, the gallery was all but empty, so solitude was there to be had in a very literal sense. But there is also a solitude within the works, a sense of focus and exclusion naturally attendant on studies like these.  It’s obvious, looking at such full, sun-sharpened petals and faithfully nuanced blades of green, that a dutiful eye has lingered on every detail, and a receptive spirit has absorbed the garden’s beauty in a world of silence, one imagines – the lively silence of a day in the garden, a silence layered with bird calls and breezes and perhaps the odd distant passing car. The benefit to be had from close encounters like these is distilled and lovingly trasferred to canvas, and as a result the paintings convey the artist’s gratification, the same peace and fulfillment of desire that comes with being in a garden - that has inspired the garden’s comparison with paradise, or to the heart of God.

One room off to the side of the main gallery is almost entirely devoted to great mauve waves of wisteria. Stepping in, the scent of wisteria wafts across the room due to some artfully placed cut arrangements, and combined with the oversized canvases the experience is quite immersive. But the scent is not necessary. Elizabeth specialises in immersion – the sheer scale of every work ensures our attention at the periphery, and that sensation of being startled by the simple miracle of a single leaf is amplified and sustained throughout the exhibition. Her paintings put emphasis on the small, enlarging literally and metaphorically, so that here a budding rose is four times the size of a human head, there a vase could as easily hold people as poppies – and the shift in scale brings elation, as well as the peculiar, if not wondrous sense of being dwarfed in a meeting with something profound. 

Its the sort of trick that will be missed if the paintings are not seen in person – seeing them printed again in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition – while rewarding enough for the expertise to be found in the compositions, and the representational success – is like missing the point. I feel, when I’m standing in front of these paintings, the brushwork opens up, and it seems like I’m seeing a section in detail from a Renaissance, or Pre-Raphaelite painting. But seeing the paintings in person, the point is plain: the detail is the subject. It’s a thought that transfers to several of Elizabeth’s works from other series also featured in the retrospective: the snippets of frames and other paintings in The Last of the Cool Skies…the mirrored abstractions in Mirrored Gul Butterflied and Seen in a Vase…even the humourous cross sections of innards and chests, where bodily organs have been replaced by non-descript vegetable forms and decorative lettuces – an intermingling with the organic substance of plants that takes communion with nature for the material truth of the gardener’s heart. 

But the flowers steal the show, and the scale of Elizabeth’s blooms evoke the unfettered celebration of spring. Its an indulgent, generous response to gifts freely given, and the loosened blossoms snowing, to the delight of my two-year-old daughter, onto the street outside, provide a fitting goodbye.

Of course, with the exception of Thornton’s fellow anthropologists, like most readers, I approach the idea of the ‘Art World’ with bias. Some of us are outsiders, some collectors, some critics, some dealers, some practioners, some of us are even superstar curators. Thornton’s study has something for everyone (and let’s face it, we’re all dying to know what goes on in the camps we’re not privy to). I’m an artist, prematurely retired, precisely because I looked ahead and foresaw a kind of ontological void, or in any case, a battle I was not equal to. I can’t help but observe that this is also the character of the world described by Thornton in Seven Days – a world where art in its various operations is at the mercy of a climate of shifting meanings and values, as construed by a horrific sort of conglomerate machine – Thornton prefers to describe it as a “conflicted cluster of sub-cultures” - quite profoundly alien to the principles our subject might be expected to aspire to. Perhaps these very aspirations for art are precisely the conditions that make the art world we know today possible, even inevitable – the conditions Thornton alludes to in her introduction when, in musing on the quasi-religious nature of contemporary art, she borrows a quote from Francis Bacon describing the function of art after the decline of faith: “…art has now become completely a game by which man distracts himself…” 

If in the process of reviewing Thornton’s book I’ve digressed to personal histories and theories we’ve lost the technology for, it’s only more proof that Seven Days in the Art World is a powerful work, and anything but a dry study. Powerful in its breadth, its ludicity and also in its authority. It’s an authority earned by detachment, even if Thornton confesses in her introduction that “it’s bliss to stand in a room full of good art”, and she later describes her experience of David Altmejd’s installation in the Canadian pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale as a place where she “lost her bearings in a positive sense.”  But there are very few instances of personal opinions intruding on the text, which is not to say therefore that we’re treated to an automaton’s view of the Art World. On the contrary, it’s her own vibrant enquiry, in combination with the ‘colourful’ characters she interviews along the way, which makes for such an engaging read. Thornton tells us the mode of her enquiry is ethnography, a method of anthropology involving “participant observation”. “Any good ethnographer,” she reveals, “has to flirt with ‘going native’, but she can’t forget her original spy-like mission.” 

The research for the book spanned a period of four years, during which time her sociological cool does not preclude her from enjoying an immersion in her subject, complete with personal anecdotes, affinities and judgments. Yet her insights, when they strike through the satisfyingly dense samplings of the various spheres that form the world of art - a mixture of casual encounters, in depth interviews, admirable infiltrations, and eye-opening excursions – are devastating.  For example, reflecting on the ultimate outcome of an evening art auction, Thornton writes: ”Even if the people here tonight were initially lured into the auction room by a love of art, they find themselves participating in a spectacle where the dollar value of the work has virtually slaughtered its other meanings.” Similarly astute, Thornton describes an extended art school crit session: “For a fleeting moment, the crit appears to be a weird rite engineered to socialize artists into suffering,” a thought that she instantly retracts, before relinquishing to her fatigue and lying down on the cold, hard floor, where its comparative comfort prompts the exclamation: “Bliss!” 

Head, 1948, Francis Bacon

This particular chapter, titled ‘The Crit’, is an accurate portrayal of the contemporary experience of an art student, gleaned by Thornton in the space of fifteen intense hours and related with a veracity that rendered it all too vividly reminiscent of my own experiences at art school (which now seems a walk in the park in contrast to the rigorous inanity championed by the CalArts curriculum as witness by Thornton). Aside from its exceptional quality as a document though, it plumbs a frightening truth, thanks to Thornton’s admirable fortitude and tenacious scrutiny. Her audit provides an account of the vertiginous formation demanded of an individual intent on practicing as a visual artist of the ilk required to keep the whole contemporary art apparatus going. The frightening part is how very far from the ground it all is, and how very spurious the epiphanies it pends on. 

The contemporary definition for art is seeded in art schools like CalArts, whose curricula Thornton compares with “supertankers” – unlikely to be easily swayed from their course. If true, this does not bode well for the future of art. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for artists suffering…provided it’s for the right reasons. My diagnosis is this: misplaced religiosity, or art as ascetic practice (an idea explored rather elegantly in this essay by Daniel Siedell). When Thornton quoted Francis Bacon in the comment referenced earlier, she omitted a large chunk that might prove illuminating with regard to the fifteen hour crit. In its entirety, Bacon’s hypothesis, as recorded and filmed in London by the BBC Television, May 1966, is this: 

“As man realizes that he is an accident and his futility… that he is a completely really futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason. I think that even when Velázquez was painting, even when Rembrandt was painting, in a peculiar way they were still, whatever their attitude to life was, they were still slightly conditioned by certain types of religious possibilities, which man now, you could say, has been completely canceled out for him. Now, of course, man can only attempt to make something very, very positive by trying to beguile himself for a time by the way he behaves by prolonging possibly his life by buying a kind of immortality through the doctors. You see, painting has now become, or all art has now become, completely a game by which man distracts himself. What is fascinating actually is that it’s going to become much more difficult for the artist, because he must really deepen the game to be any good at all.” 

In summary: art as mass casuistry. It’s not too much to expect, is it?

I could theorize on the meaning of it all for oh, fifteen hours (Heaven forbid that anything should be left unsaid). But I will refrain, lest lingerers rethink. Already I stand accused of the very fault ArtForum’s contributing editor Thomas Crow tells Thornton he is most wary of in art writing: “If your material is vivid enough, you don’t need to adopt an ego driven voice where you’re always reflecting on your own formulative experiences or your own complexities of mind.” Oops. Nevertheless, I think the fact that a remembered reprimand from her book has even now pulled me back into line with the ArtForum style guide, is ample evidence that Thornton’s writing is vivid enough. As for the tone of Seven Days, Thornton gets it precisely right. It’s not exactly neutral, but closer to ‘blithely accepting’, an achievement only an anthropologist could achieve in the face of so much blatant absurdity. Says Thornton in her afterward to the 2009 edition: “Overall…cynicism doesn’t appeal to me and disbelieving in contemporary art (as a category) strikes me as either nihilistic or retrograde.” Putting aside its obvious irony, given that contemporary art has become the very theatre of the nihilists (at least in a superficial sense), this remark comes as a relief. A different confession would have tainted the lightness of touch that works so effectively in Seven Days in the Art World, with the sort of agenda driven weightiness exemplified, for instance, in this review. 

Seven Days in the Art World was written before the global financial crisis pinned the art market bubble and reduced the hysteria at its periphery to a slightly more civilized pitch. But Thornton rightly observes that the “structures and dynamics of the larger art world are relatively stable”, and I would agree that the relevance of her study is not reduced in the slightest by shifts in the shape of the market. In fact her exploration of the art market at its peak makes for fascinating reading, with insanely high prices “in lieu of stunts” and an insider’s view of such curious creatures as the ‘hard buy’ and the hedge fund speculator. Thornton is nothing if not thorough. The book consists of an introduction; seven chapters covering ‘The Auction’; ‘The Crit’; ‘The Fair’ (Basel); ‘The Prize’ (The Turner); ‘The Magazine’ (ArtForum); ‘The Studio Visit’ (Murakumi); and ‘The Biennale’ (Venice, 2007); as well as an afterword; an author’s note; bibliography and index. 

No really, you must.

Alas, the process of beginning again is fraught with frustration and obstacle. I cannot find the time. I’m the primary carer of three small children, of the high maintenance variety, and of the general age group that can’t be trusted within fifty square metres of a palette of paint. Even if I do somehow find the time, I must also eke out enough space in our tiny rental house to establish some sort of pseudo studio, and considering I want more than anything to begin with a portrait, I will probably have to move our 400 kg dining table at least a metre from its current position, so as to have an uninterrupted view of the spot in which I am expecting my hyper active five-year-old to stand for a couple of hours every day for the next week or so.

Does this sound unachievable? Hmm. You’re right, I may have to settle for a still life (the dusty dried king protea and collection of pewterware already adorning the middle of said 400 kg dining table). Of course, I’ll have to get outside at some point to size the required canvas, and given that it has been raining solidly for the past month, I figure I’ll get my window of opportunity soon – the odds of a dry day turning up soon are in my favour afterall.

Lets face it, the hiatus continues…just not sure how long I can withstand this torrent of inspiration coursing through my painterly veins. The question is, will it ever be enough to shift 400 kg of solid walnut?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt6vSHMbkGM&feature=player_embedded

I have watched this many times, and never without that ache that comes with just knowing, with every nerve ending, every fibre of being, that the moment I come out of my hiatus I must apprentice myself to James Gillick and learn everything he knows. This is my kind of Fine Art, the sort that resonates in your bones and makes your soul scamper against the skin of things. The way he weilds a palette knife causes me to gaze at my paintbox in agony of restraint. But I can’t possibly paint like this. Not until I have a shed with a drop down roof in any case.

Yes it’s true, I confess: the shed, the leather jacket, the humanity and the love at the heart of this artist’s practice is what inspired the ‘why can’t I be you’ series in the first place.

Gah.

Zachary’s paintings inspire my inner theorist…such that I find myself compelled to write about his work, even apart from how in awe I am of it and how much I wish I had painted these impervious twenty-first century darlings in their natural habitat. 

Zachary Thornton, One AM, oil on canvas, 2007

Zachary Thornton works in an old-fashioned style of art making - a style that ‘rewards on many levels’. It’s the sort of work a person might actually ruminate on; consider both on its own terms as well as in its historical context. One might really enjoy it, even, draw pleasure from the act of looking at it, without having to glean most of that enjoyment from one’s own simultaneously smug and self-deprecating sense of humour or other demonstrations of general mental dexterity, as has been the case with much of the contemporary Art in my recent experience anyway. 

Yet Thornton’s style isn’t retrospective, and it isn’t reactionary. It’s the sort of thing that might come out of post-modernism, might extract itself urbanely from that school of mirrors, brush itself down and step out into the real world again. It has the look of someone who’s checked their appearance in the glass and then turned to face the world armed and assured. What I mean is, that it addresses the post-modern theses, and then goes on, leaving the endless reflections and dimensionless relativisms behind, but not without pocketing a little subversive star-dust with a smarmy sniff. 

Zachary Thornton, Pool, oil on canvas, 2008

Thornton’s work does this by speaking to the post modern method of incorporating the banal in the quest for High Art, thus flattening that particular spectrum into a classless middle ground. It waves remotely at parody and its poorer cousin: kitsch, whilst simultaneously avoiding the long-winded conversation they inevitably provide at close quarters. Thornton uses the framing techniques, voyeur’s prerogative, and various other recognisable traits of the realm of television, film and commercial art (think romantic thriller book covers), but he does this without stinting on technique, aesthetical enquiry, or – perhaps most importantly – earnest pursuit. Don’t laugh – you’ll only reveal how beholden you are to the soul sucking clankiness of the post-modern sensibility. What I mean is, it is not the sort of art perpetrated by a nihilistic, oblivion seeking, anti-artist.

Of course, impossible to ignore from the outset, is the gaze of the male artist – Thornton exclusively chooses women in the suburban environment for his subject matter. Its sort of irrelevant though, that his nubile femmes sometimes avert this gaze, sometimes submit, as they alternately eye the viewer with dispassion from the snugness of their evening gowns, and fret at their predicament… after all, what are they doing out alone at night? It’s irrelevant because pressed to the point of redundancy – it’s not as if Thornton has attempted this subject without self-awareness - the theme is duly noted in every mystery laden, hyper-voyeuristical tableau. 

Thornton is by no means alone out there. The hyper-voyeur has been at play all along the late twentieth century way. Photographer Gregory Crewdson comes to mind, with his familiar suburban dioramas, counterpoised by shrewd borrowings from the film industry, the thriller genre in particular. His photographs speak directly to society via its favourite form of entertainment, about its favourite form of entertainment. 

Gregory Crewdson, Untitled

Thornton demonstrates the same flexibility of approach. Its the sort of flexibility demanded of artists who aim at ‘relevance’ after the contortionist, reflexive somersaults required by the post-modern milieu. But what survives, what sets these artists and those like them apart from their post-modern contemporaries, is the earnest pursuit. What’s important here, is the maker’s mark. The signs of construction. The plastic signs: the brushstrokes and trademark lighting effects – but also the discursive intent – the marks of earnestness, signified in the instance of Thornton and Crewdson by the simple presence of narrative. The narrative in both is implied of course, not prescribed, but its existence is like a big, rambunctious uncle waving excitedly from the periphery. It’s a straightforward mode of making, that coupled with skillful manipulation of medium, gives so much more than the usual remote nod. 

Thornton is not a hyper-realist. Hyper-realists or super-realists like Gerhard Richter and Chuck Close fall short of the earnestness implicit in the hyper-voyeur’s position.  For all their finely wrought faces and banal borrowings, they choose not to step down from their respective meta perspectives, and own their own subjectivity. They might touch this sort of purity of purpose, but from the other side of the mirror – ultimately they fall backwards into the post-modern event horizon, arms flailing, grins lingering. What I like about Thornton’s work that sets him apart from those realists and hyper-realists who seem to be stuck saying something cute about viewer expectations and systems of deconstruction – is that it’s innate narrative is not subsumed by the meta narratives it references. Thornton et al are revisiting the world of the earnest, albeit with tainted eyes – and I for one am cheering.