SEAN SCULLY IN NEWCASTLE-THE ARTIST AS PERFORMER

Sean Scully, who studied in Newcastle has two  exhibitions of his early work on show at the Hatton and the Laing until May 28 2018.The Laing also has a roomful of his early-and very negligible drawings.I have seen both and found that I came to the following thoughts and conclusions regarding his early work and his later  statements about his ideas.

It is obvious that Scully was very ambitious and determined to produce work which fitted the cutting edge of abstraction as it was seen circa 1970. He succeeded in this to a considerable degree. Within the very limited possibilities of abstraction he has produced some pleasing designs-but nothing more. Abstraction while it may sometimes be fun does seem like a sterile cul-de-sac to me. But Scully was entering into a cult and the cult was flatness, and the cult was New York.This place was the residence of the chief mystagogues and unto it  the young Scully did repair. The cult was the white studio with its inmate as hero.Vir Heroicus Sublimis indeed! (That was Barnett but it could be you too!) We need a philosopher/sociologist such as  Ernest Gellner to analyse this preposterous tendency: just as he did the shabby world of psychoanalysis.

 For an artist of Scully's age the paintings of 1970 are often quite mature. Scully was only 25. But the several paintings which look like the full-frontal elevations of boring modernist blocks of flats are indeed very tedious  and colourwise uninteresting.

I used to think that he improved with age but now I am not so sure. In later work his personal colour scheme seems frequently to be melancholy and sombre,with tarnished yellows and wine- like reds etc. Muted colours  abound.His walls of colour are too much of a muchness. The interventions which may seem to float or hover in front of some of the blocks of colour  just make one think, if these are important developments  then how impoverished is the  imaginative world of  such a painter ?

His best early paintings as shown in these exhibitions have certain illusionistic qualities which make them interesting. That was a surprise to me. There are not too many of them. East Coast Light#2 is good example. The amount of work and thought which has led to their construction is quite considerable. The illusionism is not accidental. In the best of them there is a kind of depth. Part of this is obtained by the use of spray paint which darkens but does not disguise the area behind broad assertive bands of colour which cut across the canvas, There are bands and there are stripes.In one case the stripes are toned in their centre which suggests a certain three dimensionality. But in the end it is just a giant form of basketwork.A pleasant form of basketwork it has to be said.

Scully likes the bridges over the Tyne which may have slightly influenced his work. It's the diagonals you see.

 There is variation in all the paintings  if you look long enough at them. I have to wonder if some of them are in effect palimpsests. If you work over an old painting with perhaps a general overpainting to produce some vague textures and then add broad stripes etc you get some variety in unity.

Projection of spiritual experience onto, for example,  the Tate  Rothkos or a painting by Scully is entirely in the mind of the beholder-as it must always be. But here you have to wonder how many have really thought about the problems of abstraction.One feels that people are saying what they are told to feel by the art establishment. To me abstractionist painters are deluding themselves if they believe as Rothko did that that they are painting about human lives and emotions. If they feel that they are doing this it is up to them. But if so many reject the message it does not mean that they are deaf to  it and the artist misunderstood.The idea of self-expression should certainly be questioned.Perhaps the medium cannot convey the message.

In writing this piece I have looked at some interviews with the artist. I was rather surprised by them. Scully  comes over as an oracular broth of a boy who emerged from extreme poverty, familial violence, a life of petty criminality and animal healing as a belligerent self-mythologiser. I conclude that he thinks of himself as some kind of performer. Time after time-ad nauseam- he mentions his own difficult past. Or maybe he is just playing to the gallery.In itself this will this give a thrill to intellectuals and journalists.You may well say that interviews, like obituaries always cover the same ground. Journalists read the cuttings and so know what buttons to press, but it is in the end the interviewee's choice of how to respond.

Here are excerpts from one of his most priceless,  self-regarding interviews -refering to Ai Wei Wei.The interview  is from VICE magazine.It is one of the few where Scully is seriously challenged by his interviewer.The interviewer, Jenny Stevens says;

You taught Ai Wei Wei in New York. What do you think about his work? He's obviously very critical of China.

It's an entirely different idea about how to improve the world. I'm not saying he's not trying to make the world better. His work deals with the symptoms – it's reactive to specific situations. My work deals with the the cause. Because abstraction – well, the best abstraction, not those nice big dopey paintings hanging in hotel lobbies – is about inner structures.

Of abstraction he says..... it's very difficult to censor it, because you can't really ever say what it is. This is where abstraction is very powerful – it's free. What's really interesting to me is that in England, there's democracy, but they can't really understand abstract art. I've always had a problem in England.

My work deals with  the the cause. Well, there you go! Artists are obviously powerful. Especially abstract ones.What sort of reaction does he really expect to an enormous piece of sham profundity as this? My politer answer  to him would be that abstraction isn't powerful at all. What are these inner structures? How can abstract painting  communicate, if that is the right word, about anything other than  what it is itself? Perhaps it will be objected that music is abstract also.That topic often comes up. But there is a traditional language in music which was part of common culture. It developed over centuries and was perhaps not so much invented as discovered. There is no such thing for abstraction and probably no possibility of there ever being such a system. As such it can easily be ignored by the powerful. In China for example. Scully's works may be closer to those nice big dopey paintings than he realises.
As he does not enlighten us about the nature of his profundity but merely claims it, one is forced to speculate. He seems more like one of the "inner necessity " brigade. Kandinsky has a lot to answer for.But if you make the vague and  grandiose claims that Scully does then you might be asked to justify them-and he is never challenged about this.But if you did challenge a mystagogue, what would you get but either, more waffle or expulsion from the group? He is certainly saying that his art is more profound than Ai's which deals with more superficial matters.But he does not say how his paintings work to that end. There is no explanation of how his paintings deal with causes or how abstract paintings can do so. If he can tell me how abstract paintings do this I will be very grateful. I don't much care for Ai's work as an artist but his work can certainly be seen as relating to the world as it is.

If abstraction is some kind of pure aesthetic experience then it couldn't deal with anything profound at all. Perhaps painters should just shut up.We can enjoy the purity but cannot do so for long before it will inevitably pall. It says nothing about the human condition.

When he is questioned about dissidents Scully refers to them as people who might want to bring down the state. And the Irish were a slave nation and he doesn't really understand what Ai's grievances might be and isn't really sympathetic anyway. He also refers briefly to he subject of Ai's alleged tax evasion.This is the ultimate naivety. The authorities cynically accused Ai of one of the very crimes in which they themselves specialise.Perhaps he did, perhaps he didn't, but I'll tell you one thing, the charge was surely brought to put pressure on Ai and to discredit him. In a country where there is no independent legal system anything can happen.Habeas Corpus-forget it!

In the same interview Scully is reminded that Ai was locked up. But Scully implies that he visited him during this period and not in jail. I wasn't aware of this but then I'm not an Ai expert.Here are the quotes.
But he got put in prison.I went to see Ai Wei Wei when he was locked up. I go all the way out there to see him and he's not locked up at all. He's got this huge place. We go outside and get in this limo, go to this nice Japanese restaurant and drink sake all afternoon. That poor suffering boy.

Hang on, that was when he was incarcerated for 81 days?
Yes... We went out. Look – I can't speak about it with authority, because it's not my life. I don't know how it was with his father, I don't know what all these old grievances are. I don't have a lot of pity for it – the Irish were basically a slave colony for hundreds of years. I can't weep for somebody making a lot out of their past*. But if you go to New York, to Parsons where I taught him, you've got to be able to pay for it. There's difficulties in all the world. I remember the police in Britain used to hunt down homosexuals – and it's not that long ago.
He is quite right about the behaviour of UK police in times past. Thus he is positing a moral equivalence between the UK and China. What does Scully have to say about the position of homosexuals in China? The difference is of course that legislators could get the law changed in the UK. In China the "law" is mostly a tool for the Party.

Here from another interview is how he reacts when it is implied that there may be something unethical about exhibiting in Beijing.This is from the Irish Times.

"The Beijing show is the first major retrospective by a western artist in China. When asked if he’s concerned about having a show in China given its treatment of his fellow artists, he bridles."

So I should have a show in America, then . . . Is that okay? To have a show in England, where they invented the slave trade? Keep going and you could only have a show in Ireland,” he says. “There’s only one f***ing country in the world you can show in, then, because there’s only one f***ing country that never did anything to anybody, and that’s Ireland.

But "England"-actually the U.K. did not invent the slave trade. It certainly profited by it. And of course "England" -actually did something about it. And it still does try to combat slavery which exists in so many forms in the modern world.

He is quite keen on modern China but he is vague about Chinese history. Let him read something by Simon Leys whose texts are quite short and pungent.They originate before China's economic lift-off but are still relevant. There are plenty of Chinese writers and artists who have suffered at the hands of the communists. And it still goes on. For a modern view of China he could read Richard McGregor-The Party.In China, to ask for decency and openness in relations between citizen and state is to invite  threats, intimidation and abduction. One thinks of the case of  the helpless victims of the Sanlu milk scandal. Or indeed of Ai Wei Wei.....

*my italics!