Susie Hodge

Artistic Circles by Susie Hodge is a fun and educational trip through the many ways various artists are connected. From being friends, lovers, and mentors to simply being an inspiration, these connections show that we do indeed stand on the shoulders of those before us.

This is not, and certainly in this size could not be, an in depth look at all of these connections. To expect such is unreasonable. Instead, the short profiles and stories about the connections works very well at showing that show more these types of things are closer to the norm than something unusual. What Hodge manages to do very well is offer enough information so that if we want more detail about some of these interactions we have a good jumping off point. To have more about each artist and each work mentioned would change this into an encyclopedia, and there are plenty of those. The reduce the number of artists in order to go into detail then would turn this into a biography of just a couple of artists, which would be a good read but would not accomplish the goal of showing how common these influences and connections are.

For both someone new to learning about art and the art world as well as the more widely read, this book will offer new insights and generate some curiosity about whatever relationships strike the reader's fancy. For that reason I would highly recommend this book.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. show less

I was visiting the Guggenheim in Venice over the Christmas break; on holidays I tend to make over-emotional decisions about all kinds of things, so it makes sense that at that wonderful building I wanted to buy a book. I chose this one, because it was cheap, and promised easy reading.

So Hodge had to do literally nothing to keep me on team Modernist. I like modern and postmodern art; I have some grasp of what 20th century artists were/are trying to do. The book is nicely laid out: nice show more reproduction of an art work; brief artist's bio; discussion of the work; discussion of influences/d; random fact; and explanation of why your five year could not, in fact, have done that. This makes for repetitive reading, but it's a small format coffee-table book, so that's fine.

And yet Hodge's book is so bad that she managed to convince me that that much modern art is an even bigger sham than your old auntie Joanna Banal believes it is.

Her tactic for each work is the same: admit that a five year old has the skills needed to produce a work, but deny that the five year old has the conceptual capacity needed to properly contextualize it; or suggest that the five year old cannot think the deep thoughts needed to motivate the creation of the work in the first place. Genuinely random example: Giovanni Anselmo's "Untitled (structure that eats salad)." Yes, she says, a five year old could squish a lettuce between two bricks, but

"they would not be scrutinizing so many elements at the same time, including the impermanence of substances and life, and natural and manufactured materials. Anselmo was working on many levels as he explored our place in the world, looking at infinity, vulnerability, power, culture and nature, all the time considering how philosophies, science and everyday experience can be investigated and expressed through art."

I ask you, dear review reader, to ignore the horrific prose, and the conceptual confusion one must be in to use the word 'substances' as if it excluded natural and manufactured materials. Instead, just know that every explanation in this book is essentially the same: there is a conceptual component to this artwork that a five year old could not understand. This is a problem.

i) It doesn't matter what Anselmo was 'scrutinizing' (apparently in Hodge's world artists do not 'think about' anything). The *viewer's reaction* links the art object to thoughts about infinity etc... So a five year old's combination of bricks and lettuce can bring up those ideas as well, *provided they are really there*.

ii) According to Hodge, every work in this book is either 'scrutinizing' a highly abstract noun (e.g., the impermanence of substances) or (from the following page, on Warhol) compelling "viewers to consider what makes something 'art' and why artworks are so revered." But if every piece of modern art is doing one or both of those things, there is nothing about any given piece of modern art that is particularly interesting. Any piece of garbage can make us scrutinize infinity or art institutions, provided we're genuinely interested in doing so. Given that, all modern art is the same, and you don't actually have to look at it.

iii) So Hodge's argument, despite herself, is that there is no connection between any given art object and the ideas it is supposed to embody. Modern art is a sham.

Now luckily I have a few thoughts on this matter, and do not believe that modern art is a sham. Much good modern art exists: those objects are technical feats (insert your favorite figurative painter here), or respond to some specific, concrete noun (e.g., Kienholz's satires on aspects of modern America), or allow for a less cognitive experience (e.g., the beeswax room at Washington D.C.'s Phillips Collection), which can then be thought about productively.

But if you actually gave this book to someone in the hope that they would start thinking that modern art is worthwhile... well, it wouldn't work. Because this book suggests that modern artists are all slightly silly men and women who want to have big thoughts about Big Stuff, but can't actually find a way to put that into a material form (as e.g., Martin Creed), or pigs creating investment opportunities (as e.g., Damien Hirst). And Hodge treats those charlatans no differently from genuinely interesting artists.

Finally, she has no sense of humor, and so fails to get anything out of the Anselmo work suggested above anyway.

Avoid this book at all costs, unless you want a good scratching post.

See http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/giovanni-anselmo/untitled-sculpture-that-eats-19... show less

Why I Could Not Have Written This - PG / R rated review

I enjoy visiting art exhibitions, but I do so in an experiential, rather than an intellectual, way. I wander the galleries, looking, feeling, and listening, but without much knowing. (I long to touch as well, especially sculpture.)

Classical, representational art often seems relatively easy to understand: a Venetian merchant, with age etched on his face, wealth displayed in the richly textured and decorated fabrics, and a view of St show more Mark’s glimpsed from his window, with near-perfect perspective. But we don’t always know what we don’t know. The symbolism of a specific flower in a particular part of the picture, or a subtle nod to ancient mythology is lost on many of us nowadays: we just see a pretty bloom or vaguely wonder why there’s a swan in the background.

In contrast, modern art often screams its obscurity or pretentiousness. Sometimes, it just screams. Sometimes we scream. We know that we don’t understand. Is it art, and if so, why? What does it mean? Does it need to mean anything? Can it be art if it’s ugly or apparently lacking in skill?

This is why modern art invariably provokes a reaction, for good or ill - something that endless landscapes, fruit bowls, or portraits of the great and allegedly good don’t always do, however beautifully and skillfully rendered.

And that’s the crux of this book: art is about intent, and more specifically, the intention of causing an effect in the audience.

Each double-page spread considers one piece and tries to demonstrate why it is more than the sum of its parts by describing its style, materials, and history, along with the artist’s background, philosophy and motivation. You may have your eyes opened, laugh, be inspired, moved, or think it a load of clap-trap, but you will feel something. You will react.

A young child may not have the same artistic intent, but they can certainly respond to it in a visceral way, which is perhaps the most profound way.

My adult kid gave me this book for Mothering Sunday 2016. It’s apt, because nearly 20 years earlier, when they were barely two years old, we were pushing them round Tate St Ives in Cornwall, when they suddenly started writhing and crying, as if in physical pain. They were in front of a Bridget Riley, similar to the one below: clashing colours, large and loud, angular and angry - screaming, perhaps. We moved on to a more recognisable pastoral scene, and they were immediately restored to tranquil interest.

Art moves.

Bridget Riley, Fête, 1989 - power to make a toddler cry.

So perhaps I could have written this - if had I intended to provoke.
In which case, bugger off and create your own art and reviews! Does that do it?

Tl;dnr

It’s all about reacting to materialism and political systems (which few five-year-olds worry about). Or sex. And sex. Individuality - that’s important, too. And death.
Just like life, really.

Notes

For a short, humorous take on these ideas, see We Go To The Gallery (a spoof of Ladybird books), reviewed, with illustrations, HERE.

In Yasmina Reza's play, Art, one character's investment in modern art has dramatic ramifications for his relationship with his two closest friends. I've reviewed it HERE.

Miro's tripych, “Painting of a white background for the cell of a recluse”, should probably be in here. It is three white panels, each with a single wiggly line - none of which touch the edge. It took two or three years of drafts for him to get it just right. Nice work if you can persuade people to pay. You can see it in the Miro museum in Barcelona:

or click HERE for a larger version.

Comment #2 refers to my original “review” which merely said:
“Adding mainly because my more-than-five-year-old gave me this for Mothering Sunday, but also because the book I added yesterday took me to 666. This 667. Phew.” show less

Why did I opt for this book? Simple. My head doesn’t work much when it comes to abstract meanings of paintings. Nor can I understand terms like impressionism or neoclassicism. So I thought I might increase my knowledge of artistic nomenclature by at least a little through this book. And it did work to a certain extent.

Basically, this book covers definitions and a few more essential details on 100 art terms. These cover a wide range from something as common as ‘pencil’ to something show more esoteric such as ‘Fauvism”. Some of the included terms were absolute basic ones such as crayon or cartoon. But the accompanying information tries to provide detailed information within its limited space on even these common terms. (Like, I never knew that acrylic paints were made with plastic!) Some other were fairly popular ones which I had heard but never knew the exact meaning of. And some were completely new! So no complaints about the range of terms at all. There is an interesting timeline at the end of the book, detailing the evolution of various artistic movements.

However, the terms aren’t organised or structured in any order (at least as far as I could make out). They aren’t alphabetical nor grouped by similarity or purpose. I didn’t enjoy this randomised approach, especially as some of it didn’t even fall in a logical order. For instance, why should ‘drawing’ be explained on page 40 when there are some techniques of drawing already mentioned prior to that? ‘Mural’ and ‘fresco’ are so similar to each other but they are kept apart by many pages. So are ‘painting’, ‘watercolour’ and ‘brushwork’. Having a theme-wise grouping of the terms would have worked much better as all the related terms would be close to each other and would have made for a better and quicker cross-reference. This is the main reason why I can’t rate it higher. Structure is crucial in such encyclopaedic kind of books.

The illustrations accompanying each definition help to a great extent in understanding the concept better. At the same time, I wish the formatting of the page would have been such that the illustration and the details were given equal page space. In the current layout, the illustrations take up 3/4th of the page, leaving just the bottom 1/4th for all the details to be crammed in.

This could be an interesting resource for schools or libraries. Not really sure how much an amateur art aficionado would find it useful.

My thanks to Quarto Publishing Group and NetGalley for the ARC of the book in exchange for an honest review.

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