A late, late, late review of Richard Mosse’s exhibition, ‘Broken Spectre’.
The sole purpose of my last, flying visit to London, was to catch-up with my good friend, filmmaker, photographer and educator, David Cowlard who was over from New Zealand. He told me the night before that he had booked us in to see Richard Mosse’s Broken Spectre exhibition at 180 The Strand in London. My first thought was, ‘this is subterfuge’. However well-intentioned, it would never compensate for the boozy night we knew was to come. That said, it was a stroke of genius on his part. The exhibition was revelatory.
Now, I am aware that it is ridiculously late in the day to be reviewing an art exhibition that is at the end of its run - you have only a handful of days to go see it. If you haven’t already, I urge you to go, it is a visually inspired installation by an artist at the top of his game.
For me it is Mosse’s ‘man-sized’, mostly God’s-eye-view artworks that are the stars of the show, they are beautiful, engaging and difficult to move on from. Each image is packed with detail and, at such a scale, perfectly composed. The other-worldliness evoked by the rich saturated colours, embedded in each piece, speaks of a master of the art and craft of photography. So too the drama of the smaller scale, but no less impactful ‘black and white’ photographs that employ silver gelatin with gold toning, rendered the darkroom, that makes this art exhibition something of a masterclass of photographic technique. The film too, at just over an hour, is engaging and mesmeric. But those photographs….
In the introductory text to the exhibition the relevance of the work of the artist and his collaborators (Sound by Ben Frost, cinematography by Trevor Tweeten) is spelled out in no uncertain terms, it is an all too familiar apocalyptic vision of life on earth with humanity cast as a pox on the natural world. It tells us that the installation is filmed in the Amazon, ‘…the world’s most crucial ecological warzone…Broken Spectre is the result of five years of careful documentation of environmental crimes…’, and that ‘… the Amazon is reaching a tipping point, at which point it will no longer be able to generate rain, triggering mass forest dieback and carbon release at devastating levels, impacting climate change, species extinction, and effecting local and international communities.’
What any artist chooses to obsess about – and an obsession it must be – is their business and will of course have a profound effect on the artists conceit, approach and the tools and techniques that will be employed to produce the art. But while the artists obsession offers the viewer context, it is hardly the point. The artist’s process is interesting, but it is the finished piece that will (or should) be judged, on its own terms as a piece of art and its success in making us see differently.
But if the viewer, and critics alike, approach the work with a singularly obsessive political attitude to that which informs the artist, they are likely to miss out on the merit of the art itself, as many reviews of the show demonstrate. This is an art show. What we are interested in is the art. It is the elevation of the artists ‘way of seeing’ that should matter, not his political intentions. But this is more a problem for critics than Mosse. When art is secondary to a political outlook, when it is judged on how effectively it represents this cause, it becomes something else entirely.
Today it seems that we have moved so far from the idea of art for art’s sake that ‘political intent’ has become the currency by which art is approached, judged and celebrated. The contemporary artworld is narrowing to such an extent that if the art/artist doesn’t have an obvious, social justice narrative, if it falls outside of this compressed field, it is unlikely to receive much in the form of plaudits, awards, prizes or grants.
Of course, there are still great artists ploughing the furrow of art for art’s sake, but one might be forgiven for thinking they are being consigned to a forgotten past, rather than representative of arts future. It seems too few critics are willing to celebrate art as a fundamentally aesthetic activity, a visual calling, and a unique way of seeing the world. Instead, the art elite and critics alike want us to commune with art that is constrained by a narrow social justice agenda.
Many critics seem utterly incapable of discussing this exhibition in its own terms. If art is not wedded to promoting some kind of a social justice cause, they seem uninterested. They also seem to ignore the point that art has never been very good at advancing ‘causes’ other than art itself. It is why ‘art for art’s sake’ should be a central principle of art criticism. Now, it has been replaced with ‘art for social justice’s sake’.
Elizabeth Flux, Arts Editor at The Age, wrote, with I suspect, more than a hint of relief, ‘In the past, Mosse has attracted criticism for what has been perceived as prioritising aesthetics over subject matter. In Broken Spectre it is clear that this is not the case.’
It is shocking that an Arts Editor seems to relish elevating the political over the art without signing-off with a resignation letter.
A reviewer in the Independent tells us that Broken Spectre is ‘a wake up call’. As if anyone in the western world has missed the near total domination of the environmental issue in public life. From the Economist we are told the exhibition is, ‘a reminder of art's ability to shift perceptions’. Fanciful at best, but really just plain wrong in this instance.
But it is perhaps Eddy Frankel, in Time Out that best illustrates what is wrong with much art criticism, ‘Less good are the photos themselves, shown before you get to the film. Outside of the context of the film, with its constant stream of twisting, stomach-turning imagery, the isolated photos are just too pretty, the punch of meaning just coming too late after initial viewing to have anything like the same impact’. It really does feel like these critics are ‘just not that into’ art.
Thankfully it is not that difficult to divorce the social justice intent behind the work and the work as art in and of itself. Arguably, the viewer will get much more out of it if they do.
The current and predisposition for the celebration of art in the service of social justice speaks to the elite’s profound loss of faith in art. This approach to art is not just philistine it is fatal. It severely blunts the uplifting contribution art can make to public life. But, by elevating ideology and instrumentalising art for political ends, the elites and their political foot soldiers in art criticism are simultaneously trashing the past and the future of the art canon. Ultimately, it will be artists and the public that will lose out.
Alex Cameron (February 2023)
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The Boy with the Thorn in His Side
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