The Joy of Painting

The Joy of Painting Bob Ross showed people how to produce corny horrible inauthentic paintings for years on tv. These programmes are being repeated on British TV bbc 4

Apparently he practised the day's painting and copied from his practice efforts that were kept out of shot. While he works he keeps up a smooth softly voiced commentary, referring to 'happy little clouds' etc. He shows clever tricks of using the paint to depict land and seascapes. At the end he signs it prominently in red - the only red in the painting so it stands out. In a way the whole painting is just a background for the name he adds - Kilroy was here on a grand repeated scale. There is no soul, no observation, no personal experience, no innovation, nothing but a few tricks and a chocolate box image. I find it unbearable. I find it appalling that some tv producer accepted this, that people admire it, that there's no programme showing artists that are trying to produce something original, personal and not this complete trash. Well occasionally - there was 'What do artists do all day?' There used to be stuff about the Turner prize. How to explain to someone who likes this what I feel is so bad about it? Is it pointless to try? Do people in fact like it or even watch it? Bob Ross made a living from this repetitive nonsense. He died some time ago. How is it possible that it's on British tv now?

All or Nothing - Mike Leigh

All or Nothing'. Mike Leigh 2002 The first third of this film shows us a collection of unpleasantly depressing characters on a south London housing estate. Their lives are wretched, their vocabulary and conversation limited, so that I felt like not even giving the DVD to a charity shop because of its horribly stereotyped view of the working or underclass in contemporary London. By the end I was crying, moved by the central character - Timothy Spall's taxi driver - who reminded me of myself once on holiday with my husband but temporarily cast into utter wretched despair - feeling I would rather be dead if our relationship should fall apart. It's as if Mike Leigh sets himself the challenge to take all the worst stereotypes of the poor and after presenting us with characters we can scarcely bear to think exist then develops them to a point where at least some of them become people so real to us that we long for the best for them. This director works via long improvisations which actors find alarming and wonderful. Their statements are on the DVD and it's a relief to see these actors - not those grim characters after all - but existing outside the Mike Leigh workshop. They didn't get a script but explored their characters and acted only knowing at any point what their character would know. Watching them talk about the process reminds me of the intensity of a psychodrama holiday I once went to on Skyros. Ruth Sheen as Maureen for me provides the most memorable and joyous moments in the story as she sings in the pub and becomes a beautiful, confident and subtle performer who could have had a stage career if she weren't living the life she has. Mike Leigh says in his interview that they are lucky to work in a loving atmosphere where they go 'on voyages of danger which produce the goods' which are 'a heightened and distilled reality'. I believe films are the greatest art form of our era - paralleling medieval cathedrals in their wide scope and combining of many talents which are largely left as anonymous contributors to the audience despite the end credits.

Mary on her art

The Money Trick

5932ead0 7bce 11ea 968f 150b4fbbc143

TV ART -'Home is where the art is.' BBC One 2020

'Home is where the art is'. BBC tv



Three artists go round the potential client's house as they put it 'snooping'.
They meet the buyers and pitch for the commission.
One is thrown out.
The remaining two make some art.
The buyers choose between the results.


The thing is most of the art is absolutely dreadful and the rest is dreadful.
The presenter says things like how amazing it is that the artists are all so different.
None of the buyers betray the slightest dislike of the works presented.
The buyers in general are overcome with emotional reactions of admiration and sentimental attachment to personal references in the work - symbols of their dead relations or their recent marriages.


We get glimpses of the artists filing, casting, sticking or painting. They are all mutually appreciative of each other's efforts. They all say the works are good value for money.
A selection is made, quite often the buyers buy both works.
In general it's a lot of kitsch, twee, well crafted birthday card sort of banality.


The works are presented in the buyers' homes to universally awed friends.

There's a certain fascination with guessing who is rejected, with seeing the apparent genuine effort and appreciation involved.


I am personally longing for a reaction of horror and rejection, just one, like there used to be on the programme where interior decorators presented people with a room that might appall them.


I was telling a neighbour about the program. Why watch it he says if it's so bad?


Is it the absolute dearth of any good tv about living artists?
Is it liking the idea that people are encouraging folk to buy art?
Is it a superiority complex stoked by comparing my work with these?
Is it wanting one time to be impressed?
Am I hoping for out takes where the presenter reveals what he really thinks?


Aargh!


But there I am recording it!

Mierle Laderman Ukeles - her talk on youtube

Mierle Laderman Ukeles 'Maintenance/Survival/and its Relation to Freedom' YouTube. 14 Feb 2013, 2,558 views - 1 hour 32 minutes.

www.youtube.com/watch.?v=3Hr-MWXpuvs

Ukeles

Krzysztof Wodiczko, Professor of Art and Design at Harvard University, who introduces this talk, asks if an artist by working with people can de-alienate the worker whose plight was explained by Marx.

Twelve minutes in Ukeles appears, the screen goes blank disconcertingly but then she is back, an impressive, calm, assured speaker with a wealth of experience and plenty to say.

Useless mentions names familiar from the avant garde of the 60's - Pollock, Duchamp and Rothko, pointing out that that they didn't change diapers and that when she had a baby daughter she was suddenly in a world of maintenance, of both mind bending boredom but also rediscovering the world as her baby did.

In October 1969 Ukeles wrote her Manifesto, unfortunately shown on slides too fuzzy to read, and she found her theme of connecting with the world's maintenance workers and making her art about them and their vital work.

Ceremonial Arch 4-1988,93,94 and 2016 Queens Museum photo Jillian Steinhauer

Ukeles explains several projects including the 30 year making of 'Fresh Kills' a park on Statton Island, New York, constructed on top of fifty years deposited garbage, where she is organising that a million people donate valued objects, hand size, to be documented, archived, and incorporated into the walls and paths encased in glass blocks.

She tells her audience about working with snow truck drivers in Japan to make a mechanised ballet based on Romeo and Juliet.

She also met garbage truck drivers to make a display in a Madison Avenue art parade. She describes holding on to get these drivers to come up with their own ideas because, 'it can't be art if I tell you what to do'- in great contrast to Anthony Gormley who used volunteer labour to carry out his instructions for the many terracotta figures made for his 'field for the British Isles'.

She says in that work or in the studio it's the same process of waiting for the ideas 'to rise up, in the vacuum of terror'.

However it is Ukeles 11 month project in the 70's when she shook hands with every one of the 8,700 sanitation workers in New York City, thanking each one and rising early to walk all the garbage collection routes with them that made her famous and which is so relevant now because the worth of all maintenance workers is so apparent in the Coronavirus crisis.

Book by Patricia C Phillips, 2016

Ukeles has earned her place in the contemporary canon of art made from social cooperation.

One can argue that she might have been more involved politically in the workers' union struggle but it's certainly worth giving her projects your attention.

 In her Manifesto Ukeles said anything was art if she said it was - and I believe her.