Sunday, 4 June 2000
John Keane was Britain's official artist in the Gulf War. Tonight he flies off to follow a group of Greenpeace protesters in the Amazon basin. Next week he is to take on an assignment arguably even more challenging - he is to be official artist in residence at the Independent on Sunday.
John Keane was Britain's official artist in the Gulf War. Tonight he flies off to follow a group of Greenpeace protesters in the Amazon basin. Next week he is to take on an assignment arguably even more challenging - he is to be official artist in residence at the Independent on Sunday.
Keane, 45, joins us thanks to a unique initiative launched last week by the Secretary of State for Culture, Chris Smith, in which 1,000 artists are to be dispatched to the farthest and sometimes unlikeliest quarters of Britain. The "Year of the Artist" project, sponsored by the nation's regional arts boards, will have artists working in schools, hospitals, factories, bus stations - and even cross-Channel ferries.
The Independent on Sunday is the only national Sunday paper to have its own artist in residence. Keane will be with us for a year and will be given access to every part of our life here at Canary Wharf and around the world, on assignment with our reporters, photographers, sports writers and foreign correspondents. For us as journalists, it will be refreshing to have the tables turned for a change - to have an observer in our midst watching how we go about our business. The outcome will be a series of paintings, a book and an exhibition.
Keane, who trained at Camberwell School of Art in the 1970s, is one of Britain's most political artists. He had already covered conflicts in Nicaragua and Northern Ireland when he was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum in 1991 to go the Gulf. But the results were not quite what Middle England had in mind, and led to much harrumphing in the shires and home counties. Instead of glorifying the exploits of Our Boys in battle as some of his predecessors had done, Keane delivered a brutal critique of the war and what he saw as the motives behind it.
At the centre of the row was a painting which appeared to show Mickey Mouse sitting on a toilet next to a supermarket trolley filled with missiles. It upset the army's top brass and was, according to the forces minister Archie Hamilton, "offensive". But Keane said the painting was simply a response to what he had witnessed: "It was a profoundly disturbing experience."
"What most concerns me in my work," he said, "is the way human beings treat one another - and warfare is an extreme version of this. But it's the morality that interests me in the end, not the guns and action. The whole thing fascinates and horrifies me."
Recently he moved the spotlight to the power of individuals in a global economy. His latest exhibition, "Making a Killing", which opened in London earlier this year, shows a series of canvases including paintings of Rupert Murdoch and Charles Saatchi with their eyes half shut. By focusing on the tycoons in such a way, Keane said, he was trying to wrest back a bit of control. "It's a sort of voodoo deal, where you make an image of your demon. Portraying these figures blinking shows them in a vulnerable light."
So how will he view us? In truth, we don't mind. The most important thing is that he will have complete editorial freedom to portray the workings of the Independent on Sunday, blinking or not. And we're offering him the chance to keep you, the readers, informed with his own (written) view through the year on work in progress. Watch this space.
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