Graham Higgins Illustration

I’d dropped in on BBC2’s ‘School Of Saatchi’ over its run and have gradually picked up what was meant by ‘school of’, if not what it implies about art, or rather Art.

Following the well-trodden format of The Apprentice, The Restaurant, Britain’s Got Talent and The X-factor, a small bunch of ambitious hopefuls are run through an obstacle-course of tasks variously suited to their abilities and are progressively culled on the say-so of a gang of industry insiders.

I’d hoped to learn something about the critical process applied to Art but by the conclusion I was none the wiser. The judges talked to each other in aesthetic codes and knowing nods. I don’t make a point of bringing philistinism to the party but I remembered Brian Eno’s speech at the Turner Prize announcement in 1995:-

‘…Why have the sciences yielded great explainers like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Gould, while the arts routinely produce some of the loosest thinking and worst writing in history? Why has the art world been unable to articulate any kind of useful paradigm for what it’s doing now?’

…yeah, what he said.

The winner of the Saatchi goodie-bag had spotted the remnant of a tree-trunk impaled on railings, and negotiated with Wandsworth Council to buy the railings and transplant the accident to gallery-space, which not only made it Art but even more dismally really was about the most interesting piece on display. An artist may not actually make anything other than a decision, pointing the Tinkerbell wand of Art at a thing.

When Marcel Duchamp exhibited ‘Fountain’ [1917], a gents’ urinal finished with a made-up signature, it was a pointed joke which may have had something to say about a general wartime malaise of futility. Picasso saw a bull’s head in a bicycle saddle and handlebars [1943], but he was so restlessly prolific that it amounted to a 3D sketchbook page.

Now the found-object has become an orthodoxy. The impaled tree-section would inevitably have been removed by the Council at some point when budget permitted, and hauled away for recycling.

Selected by a Britain’s Got Saatchi competitor it actually did stand fair comparison with e.g. the Van Der Graaf Generator in a wig – enclosed in a wire cage on Health & Safety considerations, though in a process that apparently endowed every detail of the exhibits with meaningful nuance this conspicuous addition was edited out of the judgement. The artist had intended to have the generator running continuously, but threatened with its withdrawal – unfair to have the noise compete with contemplation of the other pieces – he opted to have it switched on at scheduled intervals which would create ‘theatricality’. Maybe had the gallery insisted that it be locked away in the basement, that too would have added a further layer of significance to the piercing vision.

Another piece, a plywood caravan containing artefacts ‘belonging’ to an imaginary mad professor, conjured up the image of a conspicuously low-budget theme-park attraction.

Yet another comprised a foam-plastic grappling-hook on a rope, hooked into a hole in a shelf placed high on a wall for no reason other than to hook the soft replica into. Because films often feature actors using grappling-hooks, this represented The Idea Of Escape.

Charles Saatchi refused to appear on screen but visited the exhibits like a Medici Wizard Of Oz and had his judgements relayed by a staff ambassador. What was he thinking? Wan’ that one.

Last night saw the TV premier of Steve McQueen’s ‘Hunger’, his film about the death by hunger-strike of Bobby Sands MP in the Maze prison [1981], the first of ten such deaths.

McQueen is not a Saatchi protegé but made a reputation on the strength of film-loop installations. Given the length and narrative structure of a feature movie he proves more than able to take his Art concerns and translate them into a powerfully coherent, detailed and nuanced movie.

The IRA’s ‘dirty protests’ in the Maze have attracted artistic attention before. Richard Hamilton, the donnish counterpart to Peter Blake in Brit pop-art, appeared in a TV documentary painting from a photo of the protestors and commenting on their ‘painterly’ use of shit on cell-walls.

Alan Clarke’s 1989 film ‘Elephant’ strung together 18 sectarian murder reenactments shot in chillingly detached documentary style, echoed in one summary despatch of an off-duty prison officer in ‘Hunger’. In many ways it should be seen as a companion-piece to ‘Hunger’, depicting as it does the ‘war’ in which the Maze prisoners claimed political prisoner status.

Inevitably, Hunger appears as an extension of McQueen’s minimalist art, visually contrasting e.g. the light of a snowy yard with scenes dominated by dark uniforms punctuated by fleshtone (these reminiscent of Stephen Conroy’s paintings) and long static shots of corridors and figures. The camers homes in on tiny detail – close-ups of crumbs in a napkin, a key in a car ignition, another key on a Union Flag fob opening a locker – in place of expository dialogue. Many of these shots rendered as outsize stills would constitute a show in a gallery setting.

A pivotal debate between priest and prisoner takes place in silhouette, two figures seated at a table while the dialogue unfolds. Pointedly the dialogue centres not on matters spiritual but political; the ramifications and consequences of a renewed hunger-strike. As it winds to its conclusion it plants the motif that closes the movie – this revelation doesn’t count as a spoiler.

The starvation sequence is problemmatic because although Michael Fassbender’s feat in reducing himself to an emaciated living anatomy-lesson represents astonishing commitment to the narrative, treated with sober dignity by McQueen, it has the appearance of some of the self-mutilation performance-pieces of the 70’s. Attention dithers between the portrayal and the off-screen preparation for it; concern focusses on the demands on the actor than the plight of the character.

TV mitigates the effects of the collective experience of a cinema screening and introduces novel uncomfortable juxtapositions in ad breaks featuring Jamie Oliver presenting Sainsburys’ Christmas food-bonanza and DVD sets of glamour-action Die Hard and comedy-violent Home Alone – an unintentional ethical contrast-and-compare exercise by the programmers, though the incongruity can’t have escaped them.

The Saatchi show and the movie have an Art provenance in common but in addition they represent windows on solipsistic mind-sets, that point where an ostensible concern for freedom finds expression in rigidly proscriptive codes.