I have to admit finding something inspiring to write about was difficult this week. Not because of laziness or lack of time but because I’ve been poor. Although worth every penny, July was expensive and the countdown to payday has been a slow one. So paying 10 euros to get into a gallery wasn’t so appealing.
Not one to be defeated, I came to my favourite free gallery instead. Well, I say ‘gallery’ it’s actually a park, not just any park mind you, only one of the most famous parks in the world - the Jardin de Tuileries. For those of you who don’t know it, it’s the big gravelly garden between the Louvre and the Champs Élysées. If you get there early in the morning, before the coach parties of tourists in matching baseball caps arrive, it’s a beautiful place to be.
There are so many sculptures to choose from. The artists found in this garden really are the Elvises and Marilyns of the sculpture world. If you manage to get a piece of work here you’ve definitely made it and you’ll probably never have to work again. You can just live happily off your huge ego.
After a good stroll watching the Tai-Chi classes and family of ducks I kept coming back to this, let’s say, ‘creation’, Willem de Kooning’s Standing Figure. While I stood there trying to get my head around it (‘hmm…is that a leg, or um something else?’) a family of British holiday-makers walked by. Mum: ‘What is it? The dog could have done better than that’, while the teenager daughter stared uncomfortably into the middle distance.
This made me giggle, not in a condescending way but because she was right. Let’s face it you can dress it up how you like with complicated interpretations and theories and probably sell a few books, but you still won’t be able to stop thinking that maybe De Kooning actually was just seeing how much he could get away with before somebody questioned it.
Everyone has points in their career when they see how much they can slack off, I know some people who’ve done it for years. The trick is to act stressed, convincing people that you do actually do a lot of work. Obviously you need to get to a decent point in your career before this works. I suspect this is what De Kooning had up his sleeve after all; it apparently took 15 years to make this sculpture. To me it screams, ‘I’m so good that I could do a poo and it would sell for 500 grand’. Of course there are now artists who actually do that. When artists talk about ‘pushing the boundaries’ should we read this as getting paid as much as possible for doing as little as possible?
I’m not knocking it I don’t blame them. Paris is full of artists, many flock here from around the world to try and make it big. In reality only a few manage to scrape a living from their work, others hoping that they won’t join one of the many homeless who call Paris’ streets home and then there is of course that one in a million who makes it to the top (not based on any official statistics I made this figure up but it’s probably true).
De Kooning’s career wasn’t handed to him on a plate. He started out as a real grafter, fighting for what he believed was art and too poor to buy proper paints. His struggle eventually paid off and he was celebrated as the inventor of Abstract Expressionism. After gaining respect in all the right places, the Dutchman became an art mega-star. Although, unfortunately it didn’t end so well, like many at the top, when you reach the summit there’s only one way to go – down. A life of mental problems and alcoholism finally took its toll and his last works were looked on with pity.
Many may not think that De Kooning deserved his success. After all it’s true anyone could’ve made that sculpture. However, people loved his work so he took advantage of this and kept taking chances. From this perspective you could see the life of an artist as a perpetual state of gambling, taking bets on whether your art is still going to be received with open arms or whether you’ll be yesterday’s news.
You can’t blame those who do make it to the top of the tree for milking it for all it’s worth. So good on yer De Kooning. Maybe someone’s dog could do better than that, but it wouldn’t be in the Jardin de Tuileries that’s for sure.
"The Imaginary Historian"
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