2008年1月31日 星期四
Rosenthal quits Royal Academy after 31 years of blockbusters
· His shows popularised the ancient, obscure and new
# Martin Hodgson
# The Guardian,
# Thursday January 31 2008
Sir Norman Rosenthal, the flamboyant and sometimes controversial head of exhibitions at the Royal Academy in London, is to step down after 31 years. During his time at the academy, he helped transform it into one of the world's greatest exhibition spaces with blockbuster exhibitions, including the first show to introduce Britart to a wider audience, the Monet exhibition in 1999 and the current exhibition of 19th and 20th century masterpieces from Russian collections.
He will continue planning new exhibitions as a special adviser to the RA, but will also work as a freelance curator in the UK and abroad.
"It's quite a difficult decision. I've taken it after deep consideration and there's a certain sentimental sadness attached to it," he told the Evening Standard. "The Royal Academy is being very accommodating. I'm going to be special adviser on exhibitions and, hopefully, curate some without going to the endlessly boring meetings. At the risk of sounding vain, people have begun to identify me with this place. It may be objectively, subjectively, unhealthy."
The search for a replacement will start next month. But after so many years at one of the capital's most influential institutions, Rosenthal will prove difficult to replace, said Sandy Nairn, director of the National Portrait Gallery. "I doubt whether one person could possibly fill Norman's shoes. His contribution was really exceptional, both in terms of the important work he did, but also the range of work. It's extremely unusual to find an exhibition curator who has done fantastic cutting-edge contemporary art but also arranged brilliant historical shows of both European and non-western art," he said.
Although Rosenthal has no formal qualifications in art or art history, he is credited with mounting a series of landmark shows which popularised the ancient, the obscure and the new. Admired as he is for his curatorial talent, he also gained notoriety for his abrasive personality: he once spat at a critic at an opening.
Rumours that he would leave first emerged in 2004 after Lawton Fitt became the first woman to be appointed as the RA's secretary. She resigned after a year of crises, including a bitter feud with Rosenthal. More recently, there were reports of tensions with the current chief executive, Charles Saumarez Smith, although both insist they remain on good terms .
Rosenthal, 63, played a key role in organising the RA's current blockbuster, From Russia, spending three years negotiating with Russian authorities to borrow works from their collections.
2008年1月29日 星期二
Art sales: auctions weather the storms
Colin Gleadell on Old Master sales
Some of the most volatile swings on record in stock markets across the world coincided with the first significant art auctions of the year in London and New York last week. On Monday, the FTSE 100 fell by 5.5 per cent, the biggest drop since September 11, 2001. This, together with the ongoing effects of the credit crunch and a housing slump in the US, where the economy is teetering on the edge of recession, might easily have had a disastrous impact on the sales. Certainly Sotheby's, the only publicly quoted auction house, saw its share value slip to its lowest level for 16 months on Wednesday due to fears that art prices would suffer. But there were no signs of any serious immediate impact. A sale of 19th-century European art at Christie's in London fell just short of its pre-sale estimate to realise £2.68 million, but the total was comparable to what these seasonal sales have achieved over the past five years. A much bigger test was faced by the Old Master sales in New York. First off were the drawings - a connoisseurs' market if ever there was one - in which Sotheby's was offering more than 100 Italian drawings from the collection of Jeffrey E Horvitz, an American investor who has been collecting Old Master drawings since 1983. |
Horvitz had decided to sell his Italian drawings to concentrate on French works, which are more plentiful on the market. According to Sotheby's expert Gregory Rubinstein, the number of Italian drawings offered was "quite a lot for the market to absorb at one time". But the $5 million (£2.5 million) sale still achieved several record prices.
A drawing of St Jerome in his Study by Agostino Carracci, bought in 1993 for $43,000, tripled estimates to fetch a record $385,000 from an American collector. Briseis Leaving Achilles's Tent, a pen-and-ink drawing depicting a scene from the Iliad by the Roman neo-classical artist Giuseppe Cades, had been bought in 1998 for $57,500 and doubled estimates to sell for a record $253,000 to an American museum.
In two further drawings sales held by Sotheby's and Christie's, nearly three quarters of the works offered were sold, with several more record prices established. The connoisseurs were clearly not perturbed by events on Wall Street.
The next day, the stakes rose for a sale of Old Master paintings and works of art at Sotheby's that was expected to bring at least $68 million. But that, too, passed the test, fetching $77.7 million.
Here the problem was less the state of the economy than the number of works that had only recently been sold at auction. One American collector offered dozens of paintings which had been bought in the '90s, many of which did not sell. There were no bids, even at $1.5 million, for instance, for a landscape by Claude Lorrain, bought in 1999 for $2 million.
The collector was luckier, however, when it came to Lucas Cranach, whose decorative, mannerist paintings strike a chord with collectors today. Cranach's lively depiction of the legend of how the young Phyllis humiliated the ageing Aristotle, for which the collector had paid £1.5 million ($2.2 million) in 2001, sold to London dealer Konrad Bernheimer for $4 million.
Another Cranach, a three-quarter-length portrait of an alluring young woman holding fruit, doubled estimates to sell for $5 million - the second-highest price on record for the artist.
Also weathering the storm in the financial markets were fashionable view paintings. A Venetian view by Bernardo Bellotto and a view of the Thames by Canaletto - both from the collection of oil scion Gordon Getty, and neither considered first-rate - doubled estimates to sell for $2 million each.
And then there were the rarities. A fine 15th-century Gothic limewood carving of St Catherine by the German artist Tilman Riemenschneider was only the second example of his work ever to appear at auction, and it made the top price selling for $6.3 million. It was closely followed by a painted terracotta relief of the Virgin and Child by Donatello, the only example in private hands in the US, which sold for $5.6 million. Both were auction records.
All in all, dealers agreed that these were strong results considering the turmoil in the financial markets. Twice in the past 30 years, in 1987 and 2001, the art market has shrugged off dramatic falls in the stock market. But, if the economy is heading for the kind of recession witnessed in 1929 or 1990, then it will be a different story.
Market news: Charles Saatchi's latest buy
Colin Gleadell rounds up the latest developments in the art market
Charles Saatchi's latest acquisition is a portrait of Heinrich Himmler, the SS commander who controlled the Nazi concentration camps. However, Saatchi, who is of Iraqi-Jewish descent, has not bought the painting for shock value. A spokesman said simply that he liked it. The portrait (right) is part of The Beauty Show, an exhibition of paintings by young British artist Jasper Joffe, which opened recently at the V22 gallery in east London. One room is devoted to paintings inspired by Vogue fashion models in the 1970s; the other to portraits of "ugly" people, such as Himmler. Joffe says that he is commenting on the relentless pursuit of aesthetic beauty by the fashion industry, which he calls "fashism". Guests at the opening were asked to separate into each room depending on whether they thought they were beautiful or ugly. Not many turned up, according to the artist. Saatchi viewed the show the next day and bought the portrait of Himmler, which was priced at £3,000. Bonhams has announced plans to raise its profile in New York with a move to a three-storey space on the corner of 57th Street and Madison Avenue that previously housed the Dahesh Museum, a specialised private museum for 19th-century Orientalist art. The company has also revealed that, having sold its Scottish headquarters in Edinburgh, it will be staying in the city centre, moving to new premises in Queen Street. The two moves represent what chief executive Malcolm Barber describes as "substantial investment". |
Dorset auctioneers Duke's of Dorchester has negotiated the sale to the nation of two important pre-Raphaelite paintings with a combined value of more than £1.2 million. Music, an oil painting by Burne-Jones, and a watercolour of Hamlet and Ophelia by Rossetti both belonged to Miss Jean Preston, a former museum curator who died last year, aged 77. When Duke's visited her house to value the contents, they unexpectedly found not only pre-Raphaelites but a pair of altar panels by Fra Angelico, which they sold for almost £2 million. The works by Burne-Jones and Rossetti are earmarked for the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, according to the terms of Miss Preston's will. The annual Watercolours and Drawings fair opens in the Royal Academy's Burlington Gardens galleries on Thursday with a much broader scope than usual. Once the preserve of Victorian pictures of country-cottage gardens, it now embraces vintage photographs, artists' books and modern and contemporary art. As a special feature, Kule Ingozi, a former child soldier from Sierra Leone, will exhibit drawings made with his own blood, as a metaphor for the socio-political turmoil in Africa. They are priced from £350. |
2008年1月28日 星期一
莫札特最後歌劇「魔笛」改編電影版
2008.01.28 03:07 pm
由英國戲劇鬼才肯尼斯布萊納(Kenneth Branagh)導演,資深電影編劇史蒂芬弗萊(Stephen Fry)英譯歌詞的電影版莫札特歌劇《魔笛》,即將於除夕夜於台灣上演。對於所有電影與非電影迷,歌劇迷和非歌劇迷而言,都應是值得喜悅的年度盛事。
《魔笛》究竟有何魅力?此劇是莫札特最後的歌劇,但它並非以義大利文寫作、給當時上流社會看的「歌劇」,而是以德語演唱並含對話的「歌唱劇」。電影以自由改編後的英語演唱,精神上而言並未離開《魔笛》。由於《魔笛》劇本作者史卡奈德(J. E. Sehikaneder)和莫札特都是共濟會(Freimaurer)成員,此劇也因而隱含共濟會的宗旨與對當時政治的批評,過多的暗示和理念宣傳雖導致《魔笛》情節發展不合邏輯,卻也利於導演在不悖原作精神下整理改編。布萊納將場景從古埃及拉至一次世界大戰,細心剪裁下盡展老練的戲劇功力,確實提出成功的改編成果。
但《魔笛》的精神是什麼呢?雖然史卡奈德在劇中多所諷喻,但莫札特的音樂仍然一本初衷。他雖能不留痕跡地融會各種風格,以刻劃入微的心理描寫為劇中人譜下最適合的旋律。然而,無論劇中人是正是邪,是好是壞,莫札特永遠只描寫而不「批判」。他不是不能看出劇中角色的問題,也不會傻到不知道劇本的確有「壞人」,但莫札特總能站得更高一點,看到所有「惡行」背後的無奈與痛苦,知道所有誇張、脫序、殘酷、無情,其實都有深沉的人性因素。他真正憐憫劇中人,博愛地給每一個角色優美的旋律,讓他們真實唱出自己的故事與生命。電影版真正懂得莫札特的心,除了鞏固愛情主線,在夜后與大祭司薩拉斯托的角色設定上也更為合理,讓《魔笛》除了諧趣更能令人感動。
即使寫作《魔笛》時已貧病交迫,身處絕望之中的作曲家仍然譜出明朗澄澈的樂想,而《魔笛》也終成莫札特一生寫照,以無與倫比的天才將飄搖的生命化作永恆。而無論世人如何評價這個電影版本,布萊納的導演心得堪稱經典名言—「《魔笛》讓我們知道,我們都有可能在人生中得到愛和幸福。但音樂則非關可不可能,而是人生所必須!」
2008年1月27日 星期日
2008台北雙年展策展人公布,明年9月與七城市同台較勁
北美館日前公布了2008「台北雙年展」的雙策展人名單,將由甫於去年獲頒紐約巴爾德策展人學院(Mesuem of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College)的「卓越策展獎」的瓦希夫.寇東(Vasif Kortun),以及曾擔任2000年台北雙年展的徐文瑞共同策畫。此次是寇東與徐文瑞的首度合作,關於雙年展的細節,將等到12月初兩人到台北會面討論後,於12月中正式對外公布。
現任土耳其「平台當代藝術中心」館長的寇東,策展經驗豐富,曾擔任多項知名雙年展與藝術機構的策展人,如1992與2005年「伊斯坦堡雙年展」(Istanbul Biennial)策展人、1998年策畫「威尼斯雙年展」(La Biennale di Venezia)土耳其館;以及許多大展與藝術機構的評審與顧問。堅持突破自身「土耳其框架」的寇東,也致力於讓土耳其走出自身國家框架,他的這番理念若帶進台北雙年展,或許將提供台北另一種展現自我的方式。
而關於再度邀請徐文瑞一事,針對外界對於策展人重複的疑慮,北美館展覽組組長張芳薇表示,明年「新加坡雙年展」(Singapore Biennial)同樣又邀請了去年的南條史生策展,策展人是否需要重複可以再討論,但策展人之間攜手合作出精彩的展覽才是更重要的。
另一項重大消息則是原本於11月舉辦的台北雙年展,明年決定將提前至9月舉行。北美館館長謝小韞說,亞洲目前的雙年展潮方興未艾,此舉已成為重要的城市行銷與競爭的項目;明年9月亞洲共有七個城市同時舉辦雙年展,包括:韓國光州、釜山、日本橫濱、上海、新加坡、雪梨、廣州等,而已舉辦五屆的台北雙年展自當不能缺席。同時,她也特別就今年6月公布的「藝術羅盤計畫」(Art Compass 2008)獨缺台北一事作解釋,她表示,許多人會質疑台北是否已被邊緣化,其實並無,而是由於時間上無法串連、其他城市原以為台北仍於11月舉行所致。
對此,張芳薇則進一步補充說明,2008年亞洲雙年展將呈現「綺麗景象」,各城市之間可形成良性競爭,台北雙年展提前舉辦,將會離雙年展國際論壇核心較近,有助於台北的成長;且同時與其他城市較勁並不一定會被「犧牲」,因為每個城市與雙年展都有自己的特色與方向,不致重疊。
此外,謝小韞也表示,明年的台北雙年展將會擬定國際聯盟策略,與其他城市合作,並且也會串連、整合台北同時間重要的藝術活動,如畫廊協會的「台北國際藝術博覽會」等,擴大台北能見度,為此,北美館目前編列送審的預算就從上屆的1,000萬大幅成長至3,400萬元,預計經費將投入於更多的展覽與宣傳行銷上。同時,台北雙年展也將嘗試走出戶外,欲以更多元的方式行銷台北;而展點目前仍在尋找中,可能的方案之一是選擇文化局所屬的展點。
【典藏今藝術2007年12月號。】
嚴培明低調創作 自詡國際藝術家
即將於11月24日陪同法國總統尼古拉.沙柯吉(Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa)赴中國訪問的旅法藝術家嚴培明說,埋首創作30多年,他心繫藝術與創作,市場的波動則完全與他無關,他擔心「發瘋式」的當代市場會讓剛剛萌芽的中國藝術全軍覆沒。
在越洋電話採訪中,嚴培明熱情爽朗依舊,他是唯一獲沙柯吉總統之邀隨行的藝術家,重返中國對他來說算是順道的行程,先陪總統拜訪北京、西安,然後在上海停留3個星期。目前他在上海的工作室嘗試以水彩創作,主題相當多元。
「日子很平淡,但很充實。我在上海都待在工作室,不見訪客,除非極少數的好朋友!」嚴培明說。「為什麼總統指定你作陪?」「跟班,去湊合湊合吧!」其實嚴培明一直是法國主流系統舉足輕重的當代藝術家,藝術圈對他評價很高。「以那一國藝術家身分作陪?法國還是中國?」嚴培明爽朗地說:「當然是國際藝術家。」
歷屆法國總統對文化藝術一直很熱衷,中國熱之後,每任總統都會安排到中國展開各個面向的訪問交流,除了政治的利益考量之外,對中國文化的憧憬是一個重要因素。嚴培明雖然行事低調,但一直被主流藝術圈肯定,總統出遊中國,他又熟稔中國的歷史文化,馬上雀屏中選。至於這趟中國行的任務,嚴培明說,他上了飛機才會知道要作什麼,在北京、上海應該有官方的簽約儀式,他只是單純希望幫助總統多了解中國的歷史、文化與民間生活。
藝術成就深獲法國藝術界肯定
嚴培明現年48歲,上海人,1980年移居法國第戎,1981至1986年就讀第戎國立美術學院,1988至1989年在法國巴黎造形藝術高級研究院學習,從此定居第戎並專業創作,曾任教第戎國立美術學院,近年在上海成立個人工作室,偶爾返回上海小住並創作。他的創作態度相當嚴謹,作品廣為歐美收藏界所重視,連法國龐畢度中心也器重他的藝術成就,因此繼趙無極、陳箴之後,他成為第三位被欽點收藏的華裔藝術家。1993年嚴培明曾獲頒羅馬大獎,並因此赴羅馬法蘭西學院梅第奇宮研修一年。
嚴培明早年心儀畢卡索(Pablo Picasso)與德.庫寧(Willem de Kooning),但他刻意避免與他們的創作雷同,1980年代開始使用黑白兩色創作,並選擇肖像油畫,作為自我個性化的創作語彙與風格,1987年開始畫毛澤東的巨幅頭像,1991年舉辦首次個展「通過他的歷史,我的故事剛剛開始」,第一次借助一個無所不在、無人不知的領袖偶像,牽引出畫家的個人意識。畫展之後,聲名漸起,從此嚴培明與毛澤東肖像畫幾乎被連上等號。除此之外,他的思緒清晰,感情敏銳細膩,逐漸把題材擴展到社會底層小人物,舉凡遊民、殘障者、妓女、小偷、流浪漢等等,都是他抒發情感的創作對象,小人物、大畫幅,讓卑微者成為巨人,正是藝術家以畫筆赤裸裸透視批判社會的反映,而單色繪畫不但強化了藝術的純粹性,同時也讓平面油畫成為藝術行動計畫。策展人侯瀚如曾為這位「巴黎華裔幫」的好兄弟詮釋:「他是這個時代最堅定、最不妥協的畫家之一。看嚴培明強而有力的作品,讓人充份感受到緊張和衝突的力量,並意識到藝術與人生的密不可分!」
2003年,與他長住第戎的父親過世之後,嚴培明第一次在上海美術館等地舉辦個人的大型巡迴展覽,並以「嚴培明:獻給我父親,第戎——上海——廣東」作為展覽主題。這個展覽讓中國人比較完整的見識到嚴培明的創作型態與內涵,也反映了海外遊子帶著一路辛酸換來的藝術榮耀,以及「子欲養而親不待」的人子孝思,還有對祖國的深刻眷戀。目前他大都留在第戎創作,明年準備出版完整的畫冊與學術論文,已累積的創作約有1,000幅,其中毛澤東肖像畫約百來幅,以及一部分單色風景畫,大部分是基層小人物的寫意百態。最近在上海工作室迷上巨幅水彩畫,大約已畫了40至50幅。
遲來補漲的市場行情
如果說嚴培明是一個大智若愚的藝術創作者,一點都不為過,連市場行情也都有一股「大隻雞晚啼」的特性,溫溫吞吞。然而今年的行情有些壓不住,直接向蔡國強、張曉剛等等市場明星比價,「遲來的力道」與「補漲行情」,將在今年秋拍持續把嚴培明墊上高峰。走過30多載創作歷程的嚴培明表示,什麼苦日子都經歷過,他並不想要多賺錢,尤其他非常厭惡自己的畫作價格在拍場上彈跳,今天賣明天出,左手進右手出,這會將藝術家逼上絕路。
「現在中國熱啊,阿狗阿貓都上了天堂,市場怎麼沒有危機,我必須留在境外,保持一份清醒,否則大家都陷下去,中國的藝術怎麼走下去?我為藝術創作努力了30多個年頭,可不願意這樣作陪葬。」「現在我生活過得非常簡單,真的不需要很多錢,2003年父親過世後,家裡開銷更省,住家裡吃母親煮的飯,一部車開了20幾年都還在開,日子過得挺好的,三個孩子的書都念得很好,將來一個要作醫生、一個要當律師、一個要寫藝術評論,都說要幫爸爸保住健康與權益,所以我很知足。我完全不希望畫作被炒作,行情不希望跟著市場起伏!我專心畫畫,現在也不辦什麼展覽,除了義大利、美國兩家畫廊外,不接受任何一家畫廊代理,也不與拍賣公司直接交往,更甭說自己拿畫上拍場,現在拍場上出現的作品都是從藏家出來的。」「上一次回中國,有人請我吃飯,談要代理我的作品,但我沒有答應。我不認為亞洲哪一家畫廊有資格代理我的作品,他們都太生意人了,不在乎藝術也不在乎藝術家,心裡只想著拿藝術家賺錢。我創作了30多年,怎能拿藝術生命開玩笑?」
「台灣有位大收藏家,在我到台北時還請我吃飯,當面告訴我多喜歡我的作品,而且一心只要收藏中國最好的藝術,沒想到去年他把我給他的畫作送到香港拍賣,我深受傷害,這簡直是欺騙藝術家感情。」嚴培明不改硬脾氣,話匣子一開,連翻掃射。「台北有家畫廊,假借收藏的名義來拿了兩幅畫,也是口口聲聲告訴我絕不送拍,但去年兩幅作品都上了中國的拍場,還拍出很差的價格,其中一幅人民幣100萬元,另一幅才拍人民幣70多萬元,讓人撿了便宜,拿到畫一個星期後就又再出脫,賣到人民幣270萬元。這叫我怎麼相信這些畫廊?!」對於收藏家處理藏品,嚴培明還是堅持「三D」:死亡(death)、破產(debt)與離婚(divorce)。
樂見中國繁榮,拒絕糟蹋市場
他樂見中國的繁榮崛起,但也憂心忡忡。2005年在上海美術館辦展覽,有人堅持封鎖他的展訊,「現在中國的美術館,無論在北京或上海,任何人只要花點錢就能拿到展期與展場,你看有多少人在中國的國家美術館花錢辦展覽?一個展覽十天、八天的,吃相非常難看。我很硬,回去上海美術館及廣東美術館展覽時,堅持不花錢也不送畫給美術館,我說如果你們要我回去展覽,就不能有附帶條件。結果他們各無條件給我一個月展期。」嚴培明特別舉出法國龐畢度中心、英國泰德美術館,及美國MoMA美術館,不到參展檔次就不會邀請,一旦邀請就絕不向藝術家收分文。「人必自重而後人重之」,他疼惜才起步的中國博物館體系,「不知珍惜羽毛,必在日後付出昂貴代價。」
藝術市場也是一樣,嚴培明不只擔心快速泡沫化,更擔心全軍覆沒。他說,阿貓阿狗,功力不夠,地位未到,市場就會被糟蹋。今天買後天賣,畫作變成股票,整個市場陷入瘋狂,「我絕不會妥協我30年來的努力!」市場上將來會明顯的區分出國際藝術家與區域藝術家,他會默默再畫30年,市場方面的問題只留歐美兩家代理畫廊去處理。
在2000年倫敦舉行的一場當代藝術專拍上,嚴培明的作品面臨低價流標,當時人在法國的他一臉輕鬆,「拍場流標,畫廊才能好好做!」現在中國當代市場火熱,行情屢創新高,嚴培明在去年倫敦秋拍,也出現爆漲行情,一幅相貌堂堂、神采悠揚的「毛畫」衝上30萬英磅,埋下嚴培明行情扶搖直上的契機,從此國際拍賣市場就呈現嚴培明「想壓卻壓不住」的局面。首先,上半年倫敦佳士得的「戰後和當代」專拍中,一幅三聯作《自畫像》以524,000英磅(約新台幣 3,400萬元左右)拍出,11月蘇富比紐約「現代與當代」秋拍當中,《毛澤東》(2000)也以140萬美元(約新台幣4,520萬元)賣出,深受市場矚目。「行情真的壓不住了」,嚴培明淡淡地說:「那真的與我無關!」
【典藏今藝術2007年12月號。】
2007華人現當代藝術 TOP100 (下)
國外拍場與買家愈見影響力
中國當代藝術近年在西方蔚為流行,但比例上西方收藏中國當代的藏家仍居少數,並且多數作品仍集中在幾個早期介入的收藏者手中。2007年多數中國當代高價紀錄幾乎都是在倫敦、紐約與香港所創下,顯見國際市場對於中國當代藝術市場價格水準的拉抬力道。
值得注意的是,在2007年10月在倫敦Phillips de Pury的「China Avant-Garde: the Farber Collection」專拍中,自1986年開始收藏中國當代藝術的西方重要藏家法柏(Howard Farber),首次將44幅出自重要中國當代藝術展的代表性作品一次釋出。其中,曾梵志的《協和醫院系列》(三聯作)、王廣義的《毛主席AO》為早期具學術代表性之作,分別以276萬英鎊(約新台幣1.7億元)、270英鎊(約新台幣1.3億元)成交,拿下百大第6與第13名,創下藝術家個人市場最高紀錄,隨即超越了岳敏君與張曉剛一、兩年來陸續寫下的中國高價紀錄。據悉,這批拍品僅是法柏中國當代藏品的一小部分,此一現象顯示,擁有中國當代作品的西方藏家已開始具規模地收放手中籌碼,未來將可能繼續對中國當代的價格波動與市場熱度造成影響。
現代華人板塊熱力減退
具有歷史文化認同特性的華人現代板塊,在數量上相當有限,並且逐一歸位到美術館或大藏家手上,精品大作釋出愈形不易。徐悲鴻以7,200萬港元成交的寫實經典《放下你的鞭子》,具有特殊文化歷史背景與時代意義,仍為整年度單件油畫作品的最高價保持者,而徐悲鴻另一件名作《珍妮小姐畫像》,由於回拍時距過短,僅名列第18名。
而位居第3名的台灣前輩藝術家陳澄波《淡水夕照》,以新台幣2.1億元打破去年同為淡水題材作品的新台幣1.4億元紀錄,正標誌出2006年至 2007年華人藝術頂級精品的可觀漲幅。在2006年表現亮眼的廖繼春,除列居第41名的早期作品《窗邊》之外,未有1970年代典型較大佳作現身,故無特殊表現。朱銘則有大型雕塑《太極——大對招》(兩件)破個人紀錄,名列第37。
TOP100名單基本上由中國當代、中國寫實、現代與海外華人三大板塊所分據,相較於前二者的強勢氣候,2007年華人現代表現成績顯得較為遜色。除了吳冠中能夠延續去年氣勢,以《交河故城》、《木槿》近人民幣4,000萬元打破2006年《長江萬里圖》紀錄,分別拿下第五、第八名之外,在2006 年風光一時的常玉,今年並無特殊精品現身,價格水準略有滑落之虞;去年出現在百大名單中的潘玉良、關山月、朱沅芷、丁衍庸,今年成績均在百大之外。海外華人部分,趙無極的幾件精品《大地無形》、《14.12.59》、《4.4.85》均打破去年新台幣1億元紀錄,價格大體上仍呈穩健成長,而2006年大放異彩的朱德群,2007年表現則相對黯淡。
寫實油畫仍有強勁支撐
以北京收藏勢力為主的中國寫實油畫板塊,在2007年仍展現相當強勁的實力。經過近年幾番市場淘選,價格能夠繼續上揚的藝術家,已縮小範圍到少數幾位。其中最為出色的是過世不久的陳逸飛,早年成名之作《黃河頌》以人民幣4,000萬元拿下第七名,在紐約蘇富比上拍的《大提琴家》名列29。此外,在北京秋拍中異軍突起的則有:陳丹青《西藏組畫——牧羊人》以人民幣3,500萬名列第九;程叢林《華工船》名列19;羅中立《過河》名列28;靳尚誼以《畫僧髡殘》名列32。另外兩位寫實油畫主力王沂東表現持平,艾軒表現較弱。
在北京拍賣公司強力策略包裝下,百大中也有新面孔出線。今年新星有石沖《今日景觀》與毛焰《記憶或者舞蹈的黑玫瑰》,皆跨過千萬人民幣大關。
亞洲藝術價格將持續上揚
由香港佳士得經數年強力整合匯聚形成的亞洲藝術概念,在2007年成為國際顯學,許多西方拍賣公司與中國內地相繼推出亞洲專拍,使得亞洲藝術市場的國際結構愈形明確。隨著中國當代作品價格過於飆漲,致使今年資金明顯流向日、韓、台、東南亞藝術。然而,亞洲地區藝術各有其市場特殊結構,加上仍有資訊阻隔的因素,部分目前浮上檯面的藝術家,不見得是各地區真正核心重要的藝術家,仍有待買家進一步研究觀察。不少日、韓、東南亞作品在外地拍出預估價五至十倍的行情,與區域市場行情有頗大落差,值得買家多收集資訊分析比較。但在中國市場高水位的比價之下,預計今年這些亞洲地區藝術仍將繼續上漲。
2007年特別可以發現同位藝術家類似作品在歐美、香港以及各地區不同等級市場,拍出高、低價格的趨勢,顯示市場階層性的區隔明顯形成。區域市場價格受主要市場的帶領,但若區域市場缺乏其他地區資金介入,導致過於封閉化,則容易造就人為炒作的空間,甚至導致地區局部泡沫化的危險。已有不少受過 1990年代市場泡沫之苦的日本畫廊與拍賣公司警告,過於快速的漲勢,代表市場以吸納投機資金為主,日後也將在市場景氣看壞時,率先應聲重挫倒下。
2008市場經濟變數多
2007秋拍市場陸續進入盤整,今年預計仍將持續進行整理,預估價將有向下調降的傾向。精品的出現仍是市場向上攀升的關鍵因素。但一線拍品經過近幾年市場流通轉手後陸續歸位,以致於在市場進入高原期、價格上揚動力不足,以及拍賣公司競爭激烈,能夠提供藏家割愛的優渥條件與籌碼愈來愈有限的情況下,精品釋出將愈發困難。
此外,中國當代一線藝術家在2007年已幾乎追平西方的水準,甚至有高於同等級藝術家的趨勢,可預見未來繼續上漲空間非常有限。中國藝術市場大多數仍以投機資金為主,而非奠基於穩固的收藏基礎,目前深受美國經濟衰退影響而逐漸降溫的國際經濟局勢,市場中的熱錢走向將更為游移不定,加上2008北京奧運之後的利空因素,將對投資人的預期心理與投資信心造成影響,2008年整體藝術市場表現將呈現諸多變數。
經濟不景氣,買家出手會更趨謹慎保守,拍賣市場將呈現更為兩極化的「M型」發展。一方面,少量高端市場只要頂尖精品再出,仍會再創歷史新高紀錄,漲幅與報酬驚人;而屬於另一方向的大量拍品漲幅有限,甚至可能低於2006、2007年的價格水準。
【典藏今藝術2008年1月號。】
2007華人現當代藝術 TOP100 (上)
秋拍進入盤整,2008年市場經濟變數多
2007年秋拍冷中帶熱
近三年中國現、當代藝術市場從春拍到秋拍的整體走勢,呈現上半年價格行情火熱驟升,到了下半年趨於理性整理的節奏,經過一季的價格梳理與腳步調整,到了隔年開春再次蓄勢待發,繼續向上攀升。2007年也不例外,整體上,中國現、當代藝術市場增長速度與量能仍銳不可當,不僅相關的拍賣場次和成交的作品數量持續上升,在成交總額亦呈現出規模不斷擴大的趨勢,高價作品的數量亦遠超出了往年,在2007年突破千萬人民幣大關的作品共有81件,較2006年的 26件足足多了三倍有餘。據統計,2007年上半年粗估,光是中國境內推出將近50個專場,總成交金額達人民幣21.9億元,較2006年秋季成交金額增加了人民幣1.8億元,整體現、當代藝術作品價格在2007年上半年的市場呈現向上抬升的趨勢。
2007下半年,雖然延續了上半年的增長態勢,在整體市場總成交數量與金額仍持續擴張,但就價格水準而言,整體市場則呈現略為下滑的局面。現代大師與當代一線藝術家,除了少數精品仍創新高紀錄之外,多數一般拍品平均價格水準均較春季有10%至20%的回檔。大藏家手上擁有不少名家重要藏品之後, 2007年秋拍在無太多精品現身的情況下,採取保守冷靜的觀望態度。而不少中國當代二線以下的藝術家,在2006年價格飆漲到一定高度,明顯溢於其他地區一線作品價格,已有不少買家在比價之後將資金轉向日、韓、台與東南亞板塊。
2007年除了香港佳士得擴增亞洲藝術的拍品數量,幾個歐洲拍賣公司Artcurial、Philips de Pury、Koller、Bonhams,以及中國北京、上海拍場也陸續加入亞洲其他國家的拍品。由於東北亞與東南亞藝術價格水準相對偏低,在春、秋兩季均呈現大幅成長,矚目的拍品甚至有預估價十倍以上的行情,顯示中國當代市場崛起至一定高度,進一步拉抬亞洲地區市場價格,逐漸形成整合的趨勢。
中國藝術市場自2004年SARS之後噴出行情,三年來已驟漲至高原階段,逐漸與西方同等級作品拉齊水準,未來繼續向上攻堅的空間將愈來愈有限。展望2008年,上半年雖仍有秋拍緊縮盤整之後呈現的行情反彈動力,然而,具有帶領作用的一線藝術家精品,以及全球經濟景氣、2008北京奧運的預期心理等因素,都將影響2008年中國藝術市場走勢。
中國當代氣勢壓過現代大師
2007年「中國現當代藝術TOP100排行榜」,當代藝術家蔡國強取代了中國現代大師徐悲鴻成為榜首。蔡國強《APEC景觀焰火表演十四幅草圖》成交額為7,424萬港元,比2006年第一名徐悲鴻《奴隸與獅》5,388萬港元,足足高出2,000萬港元;2006至2007年一年間,中國藝術足足拉高了2,000萬港元的價格水平。
與2006年相較,2007年進入中國現當代藝術TOP100排行榜的當代藝術比例大幅增加。在2006年僅有劉小東一件具新聞性的《三峽新移民》進入前十名,其餘皆由現代華人藝術家徐悲鴻、陳澄波、吳冠中、常玉、朱德群、趙無極包下全場。2007年,前十高價作品已成為當代藝術的天下,除了百大桂冠由蔡國強摘下,衝進2007年TOP10的藝術家還有中國一線明星岳敏君、曾梵志、陳丹青、陳逸飛。擠進「TOP100」的當代藝術作品更是超過半數以上,比例上比前一年多出一倍。劉野、王懷慶、靳尚誼、石沖、毛焰、程叢林、羅中立等人紛紛躋身千萬人民幣俱樂部的行列。這批後起之輩的價格潛力已超越中國現代大師,市場出現後浪推前浪的世代交替現象。當代與現代藝術板塊,在未來將勢必呈現更為差異化的發展。
中國當代直追西方當代
相較於西方當代持續平穩的表現,幾個中國當代明星在2007年均在行情上有驚人的大躍進,據artprice.com 2006至2007年9月間統計,全世界出生在1945年之後的當代藝術家,拍賣紀錄超過百萬歐元的共有26位,其中就有六位來自中國,而從總成交金額來看,張曉剛名列第三(3,613萬歐元),僅次於巴斯奇亞(Jean-Michel Basquiat,4,683萬歐元)與赫斯特(Damien Hirst,3,753萬歐元),進入總成交額前十的中國當代藝術家還有岳敏君與曾梵志,再加上在2007年11月香港佳士得破紀錄的蔡國強,則中國當代在全球表現更是令人譁然。蔡國強在藝術生涯即將邁向巔峰之際,藏家適時釋出具有國際意義與時代標記的APEC大作,創造了7,425萬港元(約664萬歐元)的中國藝術市場最高紀錄,若比較全世界1945後當代藝術家最高拍賣紀錄,僅低於赫斯特(1,275萬歐元)、巴斯奇亞(960萬歐元)、多依格(Peter Doig ,774萬歐元),可見中國當代藝術的價格已迅速追平西方多年累積的市場成績。
蔡國強的另一件《延長萬裡長城一萬米——為外星人作的計畫第十號》(五張一組),則以2,000萬港元名列百大第24名。而在倫敦蘇富比寫下歷史紀錄的岳敏君《處決》、《教皇》,分別以294萬英鎊、215萬英鎊列居百大排行第四名與第十名,一時成為《TIME》雜誌封面以及西方媒體關注的焦點,《希阿島的屠殺》(雙併)、《活著》(15件)、《畫家和他的朋友們》皆是2007年拍場中的亮點。曾梵志亦是2007年的當紅炸子雞,除了早期的《協和醫院系列》(三聯作)之外,以「面具系列」進入百大的就有九幅之多。張曉剛在2007年雖不如2006年時一枝獨秀,但在紐約佳士得以近400萬美元(約新台幣1.3億元)成交,名列第14的《血緣系列:母親與他三個兒子》,以及《創世篇:一個共和國的誕生》、《黃色肖像》、《血緣系列:同志》,均超過了 2006年《天安門》所創下的新台幣7,500萬元最高紀錄,價格已穩定成長至近乎兩倍。而同為中國當代的四大天王王廣義僅以《毛主席AO》一作進入百大,方力鈞雖未如其他明星噴出行情,但表現仍平穩。
此外,受台灣藏家追捧的王懷慶表現不俗,大作《金石為開》名列第23。劉野首次以四件油畫入百大,行情穩定。2006年黑馬劉小東,此次則僅以《笑話》一作入百大,排名第47。
【典藏今藝術2008年1月號。】
村上隆的金錢力量 扁平旋風襲台
當代藝術扁平化
在書店看到某財經雜誌的大標題:「我要金錢的力量!」這是配合國際知名日本當代藝術大師村上隆來台舉辦新書發表演講之際所出版的專題採訪報導。文章中鉅細靡遺的報導了村上隆從學生時候開始,立志奮鬥成為國際級大師的心路歷程,以及他經營藝術品牌的行銷理念。
其實村上隆在日本不乏探討藝術本質性的文章,也時常與藝評家進行辯論式座談會。但或許是經過了大眾媒體的推波助瀾,這個在台灣引起一陣騷動的「村上隆現象」,卻突顯出我們身處在M型化社會中,想要快速成功、快速得到金錢的底層慾望。
大眾媒體的渲染力量讓人驚嘆,村上隆「藝術開國論壇」演講當晚,台北小巨蛋湧進了一萬數千人次,這相當於香港迪士尼樂園一天的入場人數。
讓人驚訝的不只於此,演講會場中除有印著村上隆logo的贊助廠商名牌轎車停在廣場前宣傳,走廊上也販售村上隆來台演講紀念刊物以及相關產品。
看到處處把握商機的主/協辦單位以及民眾萬頭竄動搶購村上隆商品的景象,讓人不得不嘖嘖稱奇,這也再度證實了普羅大眾對於「名牌」趨之若鶩的跟隨心理,移植到藝術上也是同樣瘋狂。
村上隆「Superflat」一詞恰巧也諷刺了當代藝術人口「扁平化」的現象。在純粹藝術的層次上來說,村上隆現象讓我們看到當代藝術的速食化以及娛樂性越演越烈,我們不禁要問:那些個需要時間考驗藝術品味與價值的優雅時代是否已經過去了?還是拜全球化所賜,藝術已被「扁平化」的世界簡化、稀釋了?
我愛身分地位!
我們可以感覺到,村上隆的存在在日本藝術史上是史無前例的,在歐美當代藝術界也有著呼風喚雨的力量,以他對藝術的熱情,可以說對年輕人有著莫大的號召力、感化力,透過舉辦「Geisai藝術節」,更給予許多未來藝術家們信心以及涉足藝術界的機會,他也讓介於純藝術、次文化與設計之間的創作者發聲,這些新一代藝術家作品的盛行也成為歐美當代藝術市場的流行現象。
村上隆將Geisai帶往邁阿密之後,其影響力更顯無遠弗屆。但是「村上隆流」的過度倡導藝術行銷宣傳手法也讓人憂心。他在雜誌的訪談中昭告世人:「我要金錢的力量,我要世界級的影響力。」的確,這是成就他晉身國際級大師的原動力,但這絕非可以適用於每位年輕藝術家成長的「黃金種子」。
英國作家狄波頓(Alain de Botton)在《我愛身分地位》(Status Anxiety)一書中說到:「自然沒有告訴我『不可貧窮』。也沒有告訴我:『要發大財』。但她確實懇求我:『要獨立自主』。」以往藝術家都是依賴畫廊或者經紀人運作,非但不懂藝術市場的操作機制、更不懂得宣傳、經營自己的藝術生涯。
但是自從英國藝術家赫斯特(Damien Hirst)以及村上隆這些懂得自我經營藝術品牌的王牌藝術家出現後,藝術家不再被列為是被市場剝削的一群夢想家,村上隆不被市場操控,並且保有在經濟以及精神上的獨立自主能力,這或許是更需要被言及與借鏡之處。
「自我行銷達人」成功方程式
眾所周知,村上隆徹底以企業管理的方式行銷經營自己的藝術。村上隆不只是國際知名藝術家,也是個擅長策略規畫的頂尖行銷專家。他對於經營自己藝術品牌的理念清楚、經營Kaikai Kiki公司組織的架構以及方向明確、對內對外溝通能力效率高,更注重作品在執行上品質的管理,全方位且全能的藝術企業家非村上隆莫屬。
他也在《藝術創業論》書裡以及各種訪談中,毫不隱瞞自己行銷以及經營「村上隆品牌」的成功方程式。他將藝術行銷的know-how公開,並且與想要成名的年輕藝術家分享經驗,這種開放的態度、透明化地分享成功方程式的確也是一種「村上隆流」的自我行銷手法--他是自我行銷達人。
發明「御宅族」這個字眼的正港宅男教父之一遠藤諭曾說過,要在現代社會暢銷、成功只有一個不二法門:介面的操作要簡單(當然背後的操作機制必須要面面俱到),村上隆的成功之道就是在於他將當代藝術的「介面」簡化。
或許日本的御宅族至今無法原諒,村上隆在歐美像是展示馬戲團猴子般的,呈現日本御宅族醜怪的一面、無情的踐踏了御宅族的形象,但無庸置疑地,除了可愛的卡通,御宅族是日本最獨特的人文特色以及社會現象。
村上隆將兩個最簡單易懂的元素轉化為全世界人都可以看得懂的(連幼稚園小朋友都懂)卡通造型,將日本當代藝術的複雜面轉化為容易親近的當代藝術語彙,易識別的色彩以及造型都是讓村上隆的作品成為「文化ICON」的因子。操作簡單「介面」的建立是他成功的主要因素,這是現代社會成功的定律。
寂寞的一條血路
村上隆在日本並沒有像在海外一般受到偶像級的崇拜,至今還是有保守派的藝術界人士不認為其作品是藝術,甚至排擠他,這種介於日本國內與海外認知上的落差,在他每次談到日本藝術界的冷漠表情上便可明白。
或許村上隆將日本人認為難登大雅之堂的幼稚漫畫與御宅族思想過度簡化的同時,也醜化了日本文化的美感,以致於不被日本保守人士接受。
但是無可否認的,村上隆讓日本當代藝術在國際舞台上往前跨了一大步,他所苦心思考出來的「Superflat」則巧妙的瓦解了菁英文化和次文化之間的鴻溝。在日本被列入次文化,但在歐美當代藝術的領域獲得滿堂彩,村上隆在歐美的流行現象有點類似江戶時代的浮世繪,是東方與西方之間有趣的錯誤閱讀。
正因如此,村上隆在日本藝術界受到很多質疑,他在書中這樣說:「我拼命努力,打進歐美藝術市場征戰並取得了勝利,我見過許多你們根本見不到的風景,思考的層次因此完全不一樣。我拼命想做的是在世界藝術史上殺出一條血路,你們這些待在日本島上輕易感到自我滿足的傢伙是根本無法體會的。」
村上隆在日本或許是寂寞的,沒有掌聲的鼓勵相隨,反觀他自己在歐美一路辛苦奮鬥過來,也曾經語重心長地與日本藝評家表示,自己如果在當年年輕時就被日本的藝術界肯定,或許就不會產生義無反顧前往歐美打拼的念頭,而參加富邦講堂所主辦的「與大師對談」workshop時,每當提到當年艱苦的歲月,他也總是緊閉雙眼,不發一語。
你只有兩分鐘
由富邦講堂所主辦的「村上隆 大師指導講座」於上月初在富邦大樓舉行,村上隆在飛往邁阿密藝術博覽會的前兩個小時,特別抽空為正在學習藝術的莘莘學子上課。在富邦藝術基金會執行長翁美慧致詞後,接著由基金會董事、策展人張元茜分析台灣當代藝術近十年之趨勢與大環境現況為開場白。
新生代的創作者在面對村上隆時,許多學生緊張到連作品都拿不穩、抖個不停,大師熟練地對他們循循善誘,以有組織且富有邏輯的方式講解「2分鐘Presentation」的最佳方法。
村上隆說,雖然藝術家不是慣於用語言表達自己想法的一群人,但為了讓更多人了解自己,則必須要努力去克服並且學習最佳的「presentation」方法。「拼了命的」去解釋、與人溝通、performance是成功藝術家的必備要件。
在會場可以看到不論藝術家的年齡有多小,村上隆總是聚精會神地「鑑定」每一個新生代藝術家的發表內容及表現方式。他時而調侃過度緊張的學生,時而幽自己一默,全程都抱持著友善的態度以及無私的心,與年輕一代分享自己年輕時從失敗中學習到的經驗,頓時令筆者感觸良多。
這些被選上參加富邦「大師講座」的新生代藝術家何其幸運,能夠親自與村上隆面對面接觸--在日本他可是很難見得到的,更別說露出像是隔壁大叔一般親切的笑容,其大師的丰采與專注的眼神確實令人印象深刻。
村上隆的魅力正如日本ACC國際文化交流中心代表高知(George Kochi)所說,他認為村上隆對藝術的熱血澎湃以及「拼了命」專注投入要求完美的精神,是其他藝術家所沒有的特質,這也是當初他毫不猶豫地提議村上隆進入世界當代藝術殿堂PS1當代藝術中心做駐村藝術家的原因,因為他知道村上隆絕對會成功。
Record painter
Sunday January 27, 2008
The Observer
'It made me feel sick, really,' he says, after a longish pause. We are sitting eating croissants in a room at Tate Britain on London's Millbank, where Doig has a retrospective opening in February. 'I'm talking about nauseous sick, not so much disgusted or anything. That someone should have put their hand in their pocket and spent that much money on a painting of mine seemed so unconnected to anything that I ever did.'
Doig is a youthful 48, quick to smile. He thinks some more, has another go at it. 'As an artist, you are aware there is this strange money market out there, but you have no sense of how it works. The last time I had an exhibition, people wanted to buy the paintings, sure, but not for money like that. So you ask yourself: what happened to create that escalation? I thought when a painting of mine went for £300,000 that was a huge amount of money - I mean, when I was a trustee of the Tate 10 years ago, I remember discussing how much a Sickert was worth and at the time it was thought about £300,000, so you wonder who is the architect of that change? Certainly not the painter... not me.'
The day after the sale, like every day, Doig had to go back into his studio in Port of Spain, Trinidad, where he has lived for the past five years. The studio is hot, dusty, industrial, in one corner of an abandoned rum factory. His oldest painter friend, and current neighbour, Chris Ofili describes the place as like 'an artist's Oxfam, full of paintings hanging around, almost discarded, as if there are lots of false starts'. Did the new price tag change the way Doig looked at those works in progress?
'It did for a long while, certainly,' he says. 'It made me wonder: what am I doing this for?' The way he works didn't help. He cheerfully describes his finished work as the product of 'mistake, after mistake, after mistake', a painstaking process of failing better, and talks of wanting the layered surfaces of his work to be 'slightly repellent, on close inspection'.
'If you are someone like Jeff Koons,' he says of the American king of kitsch, 'and you have to work out how to make a big chrome heart or something, then there are lots of people and a big production involved. The money is more natural somehow. For me, I am just on my own in the studio, trying to make things work. One thing is sure: it doesn't make painting any easier.'
Fifty of Doig's paintings, going back 20 years, are packed and waiting to be hung at the Tate. His autobiography is stacked in those crates. In some ways, this retrospective represents a homecoming - Doig painted White Canoe, for example, at the Chelsea Art School next door to the Tate - but he's had lots of homes. The son of a restless father, an accountant for a shipping company, he was born in Edinburgh, moved to Trinidad at two, Canada at seven and never lived in the same house for more than a couple of years.
His paintings always gesture toward this journey - colour-saturated tropics, whited-out snowscapes - and though he is more fascinated, he says, by the idea of memory than by specific events of his past, they often invite you to think: how did he get here? He explains a little hesitantly, as if giving away secrets.
His father was an occasional painter, dabbling in abstracts. Doig first started drawing for himself, though, after he had left home at 17 to go to work as a roughneck with a crew drilling for gas on the Canadian prairies. 'That was an extreme time as far as my relationship with landscape went,' he says. 'The prairies are flat and go on for thousands of miles. You feel extremely vulnerable. I worked with the crew during the day, but I had no vehicle. We would often be 50 miles from the nearest motel, so I'd walk up to a local farmhouse and ask if I could sleep in the barn.'
It was his first experience of a sense that his paintings often give: 'of being attached to the earth, but only just, like in a dream'. Working on the rigs also made Doig realise he did not want to be a roughneck for the rest of his life, not least because the majority of his fellow labourers on the drilling platform had lost most of their fingers. So at night, he started drawing, still lifes and landscapes, and had an idea he would go to art school in London, the place where the music he listened to, punk, started out.
He enrolled at Wimbledon, and later went to St Martin's and Chelsea art schools, all the time picking up friends. He met Ofili at Chelsea and later shared a studio with Dinos Chapman. At one remove, he watched the emergence of Brit Art and the phenomenon of Damien Hirst and YBAs.
It was, he suggests, a curious time to be a young painter; the energy was elsewhere, with the conceptual artists who were coming out of Goldsmith's and being snapped up by Saatchi. He made a painting while at Chelsea, called Art School, which depicts three chipmunks peering out of a tree trunk. 'I was a mature student,' he says, amused, '30, I'd been painting for 10 years and I was suddenly surrounded by all these 21-year-olds, incredibly eager, and starting to be exhibited. The chipmunks were supposed to represent all these keen students, though at that moment you couldn't imagine how popular they would become or how prominent their art became.'
Charles Saatchi came to some of Doig's early shows, in pubs and odd spaces, but he never bought anything. The press was full of articles about the death of painting, but Doig, who by now had a wife whom he'd met at St Martin's and the first of their five kids, trusted those obituaries were exaggerated.
Perhaps one consequence of his rootless childhood was a hoarder's habit: he was a great collector of images and scraps of things, taking Polaroids, hanging on to bits of strangeness he saw. In London, he often went to Canada House on Trafalgar Square to raid its library of travel brochures, trying to make some sense of his memories of adolescence in Toronto. In contrast to the slickness of the art that was making headlines, he had a desire to make paintings that were resolutely 'homely', often literally so: a recurring obsession in his work were colloquial suburban and rural houses, glimpsed from across roads or through trees, domestic images so singular that they shift, like David Lynch scenes, into the territory of uncanny.
Doig's first break, and the first money he made, came in 1993 when his painting Blotter won the John Moores Prize. The painting, though apparently naive, carries the intensity that Doig is able to invest in his surfaces. He describes the way people look at paintings as 'different from how they look at anything else; it's a strange, lost scrutiny ...' Blotter demands this gaze. It depicts a single adolescent figure standing alone on a frozen lake dwarfed by the woods and ice around him; it invites many questions, not least the relation of the figure to his teenage self.
'I understand it completely as something autobiographical,' he says, 'though I don't know it's easy to explain.' The painting partly grew out of a photograph he had taken of his brother, after they had deliberately flooded a frozen pond to see the effect the water had on reflection. 'The figure is not doing much, standing there, contemplating, moving his foot. But then there is this other stuff around. The painting is about noticing that stuff really - all my painting is concerned with something like that.'
The blotter of the painting's title is a reference to the LSD that Doig used occasionally as a teenager 'without being a total acid head like some of my friends'. Looking back, he suggests 'it was an important, sometimes terrifying drug to experiment with, though only people who have taken LSD would really understand how it might have affected my work. Blotter tries to catch the idea of all this activity in the head, but the body being still. It is something like being absorbed into the landscape, I suppose.'
Doig stopped taking psychedelic drugs when he was 18, but the experience remains a reference point. His paintings often feel very much like distant products of the Seventies, dwelling on damaged utopias, though he is anxious to loosen their moorings: 'Painting becomes interesting,' he says, 'when it becomes timeless.'
As a result, his best work occupies some uneasy space between anecdote and abstract; it never lets you forget either its reference in the real world, nor its painterly surface. Alongside his canoe pictures, the best expression of this is perhaps his 'Concrete Cabin' series, made in 1994, which also casts light on some of his recurring preoccupations.These paintings were all based on a near-derelict Corbusier building at Briey-en-Forêt in north- eastern France, which Doig stumbled upon while walking in adjacent woods. 'The building took me by surprise as a piece of architecture,' he says, 'but it was not until I saw the photographs I had taken of the building through the trees that it became interesting. That made me go back and look at it again. I was surprised by the way the building transformed itself from a piece of architecture into a feeling. It was all emotion suddenly.'
Some of this emotion he brought with him, some of it seemed centred in the place itself. 'The building is in a strange, sad part of France, very close to Verdun,' he says, 'and just approaching the town you are immediately aware of what went on in the First World War and the Second World War. In the town, there is a graveyard with lots of black crosses on the graves of German soldiers. The woods have a sombre feeling that there is no getting away from. The paintings could not help but contain that.'
Such a romantic idea of painting was violently at odds with the sensation and irony of many of Doig's contemporaries, but eventually the market, and Saatchi, started to come round to his way of thinking (a shift which culminated a couple of years ago in Saatchi's show The Triumph of Painting, in which Doig starred alongside Martin Kippenberger and others). It is tempting to think he moved to Trinidad to escape the venality of the London art world, but it was less complicated than that. 'It was more to do with being excited by somewhere else,' he says. 'And giving my family some of the childhood I'd had. I went back to Trinidad in 2000 with Ofili; we were doing a residence together. He and I went back maybe seven times in the next three years - at any opportunity. One time, we were in a group show in Los Angeles and we managed to blag a ticket to go via Trinidad for two days - a crazy journey. It just got to us. I bought a piece of land when I went there in 2000, which wasn't something I would have imagined that I would do. It seemed like a good alternative to London, because, although I had left there when I was seven, it was so familiar to me. I could still remember my way around.'
He and Ofili are now embedded in Port of Spain culture; Doig runs a weekly film club in his studio that attracts a 'proper Trinidad mix' of people to watch the likes of Black Narcissus and The Big Lebowski. The flyers for the films are probably worth holding on to - Doig paints them himself.
Since he has been in the Caribbean, he has stopped painting so much from photograph and memory and started responding to what is around him, Gauguin-like. He takes boat trips, sometimes with Ofili, to the wild northern coast: 'Incredible landscapes and caves and archaic spaces like natural cathedrals, chasms, strange pelicans, islands covered in their shit.'
Does being there make him want to collapse the idea of what a Peter Doig painting is?
'You always want the paintings to have some freedom; the good ones always had that; they were escaping from what you had done before.'
Those escape routes are often tortuous; Doig works slowly, finishing maybe six or eight paintings in a year. The process of finding endings still troubles him. 'Basically, I am always trying to resolve something. It is sometimes a technical thing, usually involving drawing, which I'm not very good at, and it is always one of those things you can only get to by making it. Just scrape it off and start again. It is often a fluke until you eventually get there.'
He talks of his work with great modesty and with a sense of vocation. He's not sure he wants the extra pressure of fame. 'This might sound strange, but I never thought of them as being particularly good paintings. I wasn't trying to make an anti-painting or anything, but I certainly enjoyed the idea that there was a lot of bad painting involved in them. That trips you up, too, though. What is bad painting? Picabia made some deliberately bad paintings, but they were by him, so great in a way.'
In that sense does he fear, now he is the most expensive painter in Europe, that he can do no wrong?
'Oh,' he says, laughing, 'I'm pretty sure I can still do lots of wrong.'
Doig's life
1959 Born in Edinburgh
1962 Moved with his family to Trinidad, where his father worked for a shipping company, and then to Canada in 1966.
1979 Returned to Britain to study at the Wimbledon School of Art.
1980 Began a BA at St Martin's School of Art where he became friends with artist, writer and musician Billy Childish.
1984 Hosted his first solo gallery exhibition at the Metropolitan Gallery in London.
1994 Nominated for the Turner Prize for an exhibition of paintings at the Victoria Miro Gallery. At that time his paintings sold for about £8,000.
1995 Made a trustee of the Tate Gallery, a position he held until 2000.
2002 Returned to live in Trinidad.
2007 Became Europe's most expensive living painter when his 1991 painting White Canoe sold at Sotheby's for £5.7m.
They say 'He has been the flag bearer for painting when it came back into fashion. His works are very commercial objects, very traditional, very romantic and also incredibly complex.' Francis Outred, Sotheby's senior director.
He says 'You have to be pretty romantic to do what I do ... to succumb to it. If you thought about it too much, you'd stop.'
Peter Doig will run at Tate Britain, London SW1, 5 February-27 April
全錄換Logo 展現新形象
2008.01.27 04:51 am
看到全錄(Xerox)這個名字,腦海中還會浮現影印機的影像嗎?全錄對這種刻板印象非常感冒,畢竟這家公司已完全轉型,產品包羅萬象,涵蓋辦公室設備、文件流量處理與檔案管理軟體,不再只生產影印機。
最近,全錄的營收主要來自印表機與影印機,這些機器不僅可連上網路,還能供辦公室及高速出版使用。全錄在過去三年推出上百種產品,管理企業文件流量等服務,已成為業績快速成長的事業,所以全錄不想被認定只是一家硬體製造公司。
紅色小寫英文字 擺脫刻板
為擺脫外界刻板的印象,全錄推動了自1961年從Haloid Xerox公司名稱中拿掉Haloid以來,最全面的企業標幟變更計畫。全錄在1月7日公布了新企業標幟,用紅體的小寫英文字「xerox」,取代沿用了 40多年的紅色大寫英文字母「XEROX」,以呼應該公司廣告部門副總裁佛甘(Richard Vergan)提出的「反映全錄現況的品牌識別」主張。
全錄的企業新標幟包括兩大主體,在亮紅色的英文小寫字體「xerox」旁邊,有一顆表面有兩大束線橫亙交錯、形成「X」大寫字形的紅色球體。全錄執行長穆凱伊(Anne Mulcahy)說,這個X字略帶藝術風味,代表全錄要與客戶、合作夥伴、產業及創新連結。穆凱伊還強調,新標幟彰顯全錄是一家「有魅力、可親近、精通科技,並渴望在21世紀成為業界領導者」的公司。
全錄與品牌顧問業者Interbrand合作,花了18個月在世界各地訪談約5,000人,以了解全錄的企業標幟會讓他們聯想到什麼。之後,這個小組開始著手構思重塑品牌,保留全錄留給外界最美好印象的特色(例如可靠、穩定),揚棄不太好的形象(例如太正式、有點笨拙),最重要的是,加入一些現代感、創新與彈性等特質。
品牌重塑小組想要一個可用於網際網路及快速移動摩托車的企業標幟,就像在平面或電視媒體的宣傳廣告。Interbrand品牌資深董事史坦普說:「全錄在使用舊企業標幟時,根本沒有網際網路、廣告贊助,以及各種3D圖案。但當企業標幟可用動畫呈現,你就不會使用文字符號。」
史坦普說,品牌重塑小組選用小寫字體,因為看起來比較具有親和力,而且深紅的厚字體在網際網路與高畫質電視上更醒目。他們選用球體的目的,是取其向前邁進與圓滿之意。他們還設計了一系列各色捲線,希望讓人聯想到用以表達支持研究愛滋病及乳癌防治的絲帶。
全錄的新企業標幟不全然都代表新事物。研究顯示,全錄讓人們強烈聯想到紅色,因而保留了紅色字體。史坦普說,保留紅色有另一項意想不到的優勢,因為全錄的海外銷售比重很高,而且「在亞太地區,紅色會讓人聯想到幸運、吉祥、繁榮和親善」。
企業識別體醒目 增親和力
全錄計畫大張旗鼓展示與宣傳新識別標幟,這顆紅球可輕易用多媒體動畫呈現,尤其可傳送至手持裝置。佛甘說,今年數數百萬美元的宣傳費用,主要會花在新企業標幟上,但他未提確切金額。全錄的發言人莫勒透露,今年花在互動與線上媒體的宣傳預算,將比去年增加「兩位數」,同時將減少電視或平面等傳統媒體的廣告支出。
全錄的新商標宣傳能否一炮而紅,或只是白花冤枉錢,外界看法兩極化。顧問業者Sterling Brands公司總裁威廉斯說,全錄不再是一家守舊且過時的影印機製造商。小寫字體較不令人生畏,較能與客戶對話,少了權威味道。紅球則增添能量、年輕和動力。但品牌顧問業者Straightline International總裁華特拉斯說,更改字體無助於全錄擺脫印表機製造商的形象,「他們該做的是讓商標與某些產品連結,而非改字體」。
(取材自華爾街日報)
米勒名畫展》迎接米勒 超完美準備
2008.01.27 03:29 am
重量級名畫「拾穗」與「晚禱」,將在5月底來台,法國國寶出借,我方自然要祭出「超完美保全」。史博館表示,本次展覽的安全防護,將是前所未有的高規格,除了為兩幅名畫加設特製的玻璃展櫃,兩幅畫作各投保1億歐元,整檔展覽的保險總額,將超過新台幣百億元,刷新台灣藝文界紀錄。
史博館副館長高玉珍說,這是史博館繼1997年舉辦「黃金印象,奧塞美術館名作特展」後,再度與奧塞美術館合作,光是支付給法方的借展費,就要百萬歐元,總策展經費更是高達新台幣1億元。由於米勒的兩幅名畫已被法國列為「國寶級」畫作,安全規格更甚於11年前來台展出的梵谷、高更等大師作品。
為求分散風險,「雞蛋別放在同一個籃子裡」,奧塞美術館要求,此次展覽的70件作品,要分三梯次搭機來台。另外為避免兩地溫差過大、熱脹冷縮損害畫作,作品抵台落地後,還得先靜置24小時,才能開箱。
高玉珍說,史博館已規劃,為兩件名畫量身打造玻璃展櫃,必要時將安裝防彈玻璃,並限制觀眾入場的流量及觀賞距離,就連觀眾在館內講話,也要跟名畫維持一定距離,避免水氣傷害畫作。
特別的是,奧塞美術館為了確保國寶的安全滴水不漏,還要求加保戰爭險、內亂險、地震險等等,由於台灣找不到保險公司承辦如此多種保險,因此主辦單位費盡千辛萬苦,終於找到法國當地的保險業者承做。
除了自聘的保全人員之外,史博館也向台北市政府中正二分局申請支援,希望能加強警力巡邏,估計至少會增派20位員警、24小時荷槍實彈在史博館周遭巡邏、戒備,向世界展現我方對藝術瑰寶的重視。
米勒名畫展》賞名畫 把握每一分一秒
2008.01.27 03:29 am
「驚艷米勒,田園之美」大展,將於5月底登場,為迎接世界級名畫,史博館將砸下重金全面改裝一樓展場,展覽期間,還將打破慣例、延長開放時間。民間藝文界人士、國內各重量級收藏家,也已開始動員,準備組團賞畫。
這次的米勒大展,選在史博館一樓登場,史博館表示,屆時史博館一樓的室內空間將會全面改裝,為70幅作品量身打造。目前已請室內設計師著手繪製設計圖稿,將以簡單、大方、動線流暢、不搶畫作風采為設計主軸。除了室內空間改裝之外,史博館還將特製玻璃展櫃,加強控制展場環境,維持恆溫與恆溼。
此外,一般展覽開放時間多為早上10時至下午6時,但為了讓更多台灣民眾欣賞到米勒作品,主辦單位破天荒決定,將開放時間延至晚上9時,甚至不排除開放至半夜,把握住經典名畫在台灣的每一分、每一秒。
迎接米勒大作,不僅史博館全面總動員,民間藝文界人士也已經動了起來。據了解,「藝術導覽名嘴」如資深拍賣官陸潔民、畫廊協會副理事長黃河等人,這幾天都是電話響不停,很多畫迷與收藏家已來電預約,希望能組團賞畫。
米勒名畫展》巴比松七子畫作 一次滿足
2008.01.27 03:29 am
米勒生於1814年、卒於1875年,是崇尚自然的田園畫家,也是巴比松畫派的代表人物。後世藝評家普遍認為,米勒的創作,畫出了當時法國社會平民百姓最真實的一面,高貴而不朽,也引發普世共鳴。
米勒雖出身富裕的農家,小時候常常下田勞動,因而對土地有特別的感情。他在17歲時創作出「牧羊人在看守他的羊群」畫作,顯露他的繪畫天賦,成年後就前往巴黎學畫。
學成之後,米勒定居於巴黎附近的巴比松,開始以田園風光、庶民百姓為素材作畫。「拾穗」與「晚禱」是米勒最著名的兩幅作品,創作時間很接近,當時米勒共有九個小孩,生活壓力十分沈重,因此能貼切的畫出農夫農婦為生活打拚的神情。
米勒對自己畫作的要求十分嚴格,傳世的作品並不多,約僅80幅,而且多數是小件作品。在奧塞美術館的米勒廳中,收藏有19件,此次將有16件作品來台展出。
資深拍賣官陸潔民表示,在米勒之前,畫家創作多為服務貴族或宗教,很少人關注市井小民的生活;米勒是第一個跳脫出來、以農民生活為創作題材的畫家。
陸潔民說,米勒作品構圖十分嚴謹、色彩協調柔美,而且每張畫都充分表現勞動者的樸拙和真實,帶有濃厚的人道關懷色彩。藝術大師梵谷曾多次表示,米勒是他最崇拜的畫家,也常以米勒畫作為臨摹對象。梵谷甚至曾以米勒的作品「播種者」為創作元素,重新繪製一張「梵谷版」的「播種者」,向大師致意的意味濃厚。
畫廊協會副理事長黃河進一步分析,17世紀歐美主要創作流派為巴洛克藝術,18世紀則進入洛可可時期,這兩大流派,都非常強調華麗、精緻與優雅,裝飾性很強烈。
到了19世紀,由於工業革命與法國大革命,社會制度與生活型態劇烈變遷。黃河說,皇權崩解、沙龍式微,藝術家得以自由創作,不再為貴族服務,米勒、柯洛、胡梭等人,就是最好的例子。而在1841年時,法國第一家畫廊也成立了,藝術自此開始產生市場的概念。
在外在環境的變遷下,19世紀歐美畫壇,產生四大創作流派,其中米勒所屬的巴比松畫派,於19世紀中葉興起,前有新古典主義與浪漫主義,後有印象派,黃河認為,巴比松畫派在美術史上,扮演著承先啟後的重要地位。
巴比松畫派的代表人物,除了米勒之外,還有柯洛、胡梭、賈克、迪亞茲、特華雍與多比尼,後人稱為「巴比松七子」。黃河表示,此次「巴比松七子」畫作全部來台,一個都沒有缺席,非常難得,對藝術有興趣的民眾,可把握機會、親炙大師畫作。
驚艷米勒 展現藝術商機
2008.01.27 03:29 am
2008夏天,台灣最時尚的休閒,莫過於欣賞藝術大師米勒的名畫真跡。
由聯合報系與國立歷史博物館共同舉辦的「驚艷米勒,田園之美」畫展,將在台北的初夏5月底登場,田園畫家米勒的曠世名作「晚禱」和「拾穗」,將首度在台現身,這兩幅作品被視為法國國寶,從未同時借展海外。
為了迎接這些珍貴畫作來台,史博館將改裝一樓展場、延長開放時間,預料將會吸引60萬人次參觀;聯合報系也與法蘭瓷等業者合作,設計出50款紀念品,從記事本、扇子,到衣服、馬克杯,應有盡有,衍生商機無限。
台灣藝術產業發展成熟,一般民眾的美學素養也都不錯,多數藝術市場人士,均看好台灣市場;但政治因素使然,類似的名家大畫來台展出,並不容易,尤其是台灣與法國並無邦交,卻能成功借展、打敗其他同樣爭取米勒作品展出的國家,究竟如何辦到的,格外受外界關注。
史博館長黃永川表示,一年多前,藝文界人士就聽聞奧塞美術館的米勒廳,將關閉數個月、進行大整修,我方於是透過聯合報系發行人王效蘭,在第一時間與奧塞洽談、爭取米勒畫作來台展出。
但米勒廳將整修的消息,越傳越遠,各界壓力也蜂擁而至,尤其日本人最愛歐美畫作,東京早就多次向奧塞爭取米勒畫作展出,卻遲遲未能成行,其他地區如新加坡、首爾、北京、上海等,也非常積極,而且所擁有的條件都不輸台灣。
黃永川透露,由於王效蘭與法方藝文界人士私交甚篤,一開始就占了優勢;加上史博館與聯合報系過往曾共同舉辦兵馬俑特展,交出單場展覽參觀人次105萬人的成績單、打破世界紀錄,又陸續舉辦過美索不達米亞文物展、法國繪畫三百年展、馬諦斯特展與羅浮宮埃及文物展等大型展覽,辦展能力頗受法方肯定,因此去年秋天,雙方就已大致談妥借展事宜。
去年11月,奧塞美術館派出三位高層主管來台視察,確認史博館的場地情況,以及聯合報系與史博館所累積的辦展實力後,「驚艷米勒,田園之美」一展正式敲定。就在上周,王效蘭專程赴法,與奧塞美術館長勒摩安(Serge Lemoine)簽訂展覽合約。
王效蘭在簽約後表示,「晚禱」和「拾穗」這兩件作品,收錄在國小美術教材中,幾乎每個台灣人都曾看過,可說是感動最多人的畫作。此次奧塞美術館能同時借出展覽,讓她感到受寵若驚,也很期待台灣民眾親身體驗米勒真跡後,能有所收穫。
黃永川說,由於法國將米勒畫作視為國寶,此次展覽,借展費用高達百萬歐元,非常驚人。展出的作品將分三梯次運送來台,主辦單位也已為這批畫作,保了台幣百億元的鉅額保險,其中「拾穗」與「晚禱」兩張畫,就各保了1億歐元。
黃永川表示,此次「驚艷米勒,田園之美」大展,將從5月31日展至9月5日,共展出70件作品,其中米勒的畫作有16幅,另有32件是巴比松畫派成員如胡梭、柯洛、迪亞茲、德崗等人的畫作,還有22件攝影作品,忠實紀錄19世紀的法國社會。
今年夏天,記得來史博館走一趟,為自己的藝術存摺加值。
薩哈哈蒂 奪家飾展大會獎
2008.01.27 03:52 am
每年,巴黎家飾展都會把大會獎頒給一位當代最具代表性的設計師,今年「巴黎家飾展大會獎」頒給了薩哈哈蒂 (Zaha Hadid),另有兩項大獎「生活設計獎」、「最佳室內設計師獎」則分別頒給了派翠西亞奧克拉 (Patricia URQUIOLA)和凱莉霍普 (Kelly Hoppen),女性設計師終於能在設計界揚眉吐氣了。
當代建築和室內設計多半是男性設計師的天下,女性設計師很難出頭。不過本屆巴黎家飾展把多項大獎頒給女性設計師,無疑提升了當代女性設計師的地位。
薩哈哈蒂作品風格前衛、充滿未來感,曾榮獲建築界最高榮譽的「Pritzker建築獎」,作品包括紐約古根漢美術館和倫敦設計博物館等。近期她為香奈兒設計的大型建築物──行動美術館 (Mobile Art),即將在香港展出,免費開放參觀。
年輕又美麗的派翠西亞奧克拉也是建築師,她曾為Alessi、B&B 、Flos、Kartell等知名家飾品牌設計作品,並有多項作品榮獲紐約當代美術館收藏。凱莉霍普也是世界大獎的常勝軍,其中最知名的作品是為英國航空設計機艙內裝。
2008年1月26日 星期六
Meet Zhang Xiaogang, China's hottest artist
As Britain prepares to celebrate China’s vibrant arts scene, our writer meets Zhang Xiaogang, China's Red Star
It’s a sign of the times. One of China’s most successful artists has just taken over the shell of a bankrupt motorcycle helmet factory as his studio. And the government apparatchiks who once banned his work are lining up for a chance to show off his paintings.
Zhang Xiaogang seems almost untouched by his rise to fame and fortune. An unassuming, bespectacled man of nearly 50, he is unimpressed that his paintings can now command between $500,000 and $1 million per canvas. And several times that at auction.
But he is excited that several of his paintings will be on show soon at the Saatchi collection in London as part of the China Now festival.
“Is there a meaning to showing my art in London? Of course there is. Britain is a great centre for art with its museums and its galleries. It’s a great opportunity to show my works to an audience that has such a deep historical appreciation of culture.”
Sitting at a huge table in his cavernous new studio, Zhang lights another cigarette. Lining the walls are his latest works, half-finished canvases and others already signed and ready for display. He is a thoughtful man, clearly delighted to discuss the forces that have inspired him. He is thrilled that his paintings have drawn the attention of a buyer such as Charles Saatchi, who acquired his first Zhang Xiaogang work at auction and has since bought several directly from the artist. That first painting was one of Zhang’s acclaimed Bloodlineseries, which has broken records at auctions in the West for a couple of years now.
These androgynous portraits, based on the stiff studio family photographs popular during the Cultural Revolution years in the 1960s and 1970s, can be disturbing. Zhang is the first to agree. “These are not happy paintings,” he says, “but they reflect my innermost feelings.” He recounts the tale of one Chinese buyer who hung one on the landing. His wife got up one night to fetch a drink in the kitchen, walked back up the stairs and was so terrified by the black pools of the portrait’s eyes that she took a tumble. The owner had to go back to the gallery and swap the painting for something less troubling by another artist. “The eyes are the most important for me and I use a special technique that takes me a long time,” Zhang says. “You could say these paintings are really sick and the people appear stupefied.”
It was with this series, which he now prefers to call Big Family, that he feels he finally found his way as an artist after floundering for more than a decade during the 1980s and early 1990s. “They reflect the contradictions in China between the individual and society,” he says. “Contradictions in so many relationships – not just within families, but among friends and in the workplace.”
He happened across some family photographs on a visit to his parents in 1993. “I felt very excited, as if a door had opened. I could see a way to paint the contradictions between the individual and the collective and it was from this that I started really to paint.” He chose the chaotic era of the ultra-leftist Cultural Revolution because this was when the individual was entirely subsumed by the group, yet these photographs allowed their subjects to retain a tiny speck of their real self. For Zhang, this age of revolutionary fervour and the relationships it stirred are unique to China. However, his work is not intended to show links to the Cultural Revolution, but to reflect the psychology of people who had lived through such turbulent times.
“There’s a complex relationship between the state and the people that I could express by using the Cultural Revolution. China is like a family, a big family. Everyone has to rely on each other and to confront each other. This was the issue I wanted to give attention to and, gradually, I became less and less linked to the Cultural Revolution and more to people’s states of mind.”
It was many years before these paintings, based on photographs from an era the authorities are keen to forget, were permitted to be displayed publicly in China. In 1996, Zhang was thrilled to be invited to show at the Shanghai Biennale, but his work was pulled on the orders of a senior Communist Party official anxious about what he saw as reminiscences of the Cultural Revolution. That is no longer an issue.
A combination of international fame and changes in official attitudes have transformed Zhang into virtually an Establishment artist. He was even commissioned by the authorities to provide a painting for the metro in the southern boomtown of Shenzhen – though the soaring value has meant that the work is now on show in a city museum.
A slow painter who works alone, often at night, Zhang can barely keep pace with demand. He gestures to one painting of five little boys that remains unfinished after four years. Most of his buyers are international collectors. “Many people in China want to buy my paintings now,” he says, “but for them art is like stocks and shares, and they just want to ‘stir-fry’ the prices. So I am careful who I sell to.” In the past two years he estimates that he has sold five or six paintings in China, compared with up to 40 to foreign buyers.
He is now in the throes of two new series – Inside and Outside and Amnesia and Memory. The wrenching changes that are transforming China at an unprecedented pace fascinate Zhang. “When the order comes to raze a place, then it is razed in an instant.
Sometimes an ancient building that has existed for thousands of years gets in the way of a road and it just disappears. This can erase someone’s memories overnight.”
Some of the most imposing works lining his vast studio are landscapes that he describes with passion as personal memories of China as he remembers it. “In Italy, every second of their history is valuable. In China history is like water, it flows and disappears. I want to face tomorrow. We have sacrificed much of yesterday for tomorrow in China.”
One arresting painting is a huge, flat landscape in greys and blacks, the only colour from a naked baby splashed in red and yellow, and dotted by a string of loudspeakers. The loudspeakers show up in several paintings in the Amnesia and Memory series. Zhang remembers these as an integral part of his childhood years, exiled to a village where loudspeakers bellowing out music and state propaganda were the only entertainment. “There was nothing else to hear, no other choice.” His choice of colours continues the sombre hues of the Big Familyseries. Zhang says this is no surprise, likening his work to a tree with many different branches growing out from the trunk. “I don’t want to plant a forest, but a single tree that I hope will grow to be very big. I really have just one strand of thought and I dig deeper and deeper until I can’t go any farther. I will only change when I’m utterly sick of it.”
The Revolution Continues: New Chinese Art, Saatchi Gallery, The Duke of York’s HQ, Kings Road, London SW3 (www. saatchi-gallery.co.uk ), dates TBC. For more information on China Now events, visit www.chinanow.org.uk
CHINESE ARTS AND DESIGN
GO! INTERNAL MIGRATION IN CHINA
The photographer Rhodri Jones captures the enormous scale of migration in China, and the human cost. Side Gallery, 5-9 Side, Newcastle Upon Tyne (www.amber-online.com 0191-232 2000), Feb 2-Apr 6
MANHUA! CHINA COMICS NOW
The comic book has a serious function in China, from political propaganda to education for the illiterate. This fascinating show reflects on its history and future. London College of Communication, Elephant & Castle, London SE1 (www.lcc.arts.ac.uk 020-7514 6500), Mar 7-Apr 11
CHINA DESIGN NOW
From the “bird’s nest” Olympic stadium in Beijing to the wackiest fashions and trendiest graphics, this show celebrates the explosion of creative energy in today’s China. V&A, Cromwell Road, London SW7 (www.vam.ac.uk 020-7942 2000), Mar 15-Jul 13
CHINA NOW WOW
A film tour across the UK from April to July. Various venues (www.chinanow.org.uk)
DIALOGUES OF WIND AND BAMBOO
A sculptural soundscape created from bamboo plants evoking the lyric beauty of Chinese traditions. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Inverleith Row (www.rbge.org.uk 0131-552 7171), May 16-Jun 29
THE FAR WEST PROJECT
A sharp commentary on the increasingly strong relationship between East and West. The gallery turns into a sort of trading centre, with factory section and online shopping service. Arnolfini, 16 Narrow Quay, Bristol (www.arnolfini.org.uk 0117-917 2300), Jun 21-Aug 31
CHINA NOW
For children, the museum stages a series of themed study days on traditional Chinese culture from dancing dragons to the tombs of the dead. British Museum, Great Russell Street, London WC1 (www.britishmuseum.org 020-7323 8000), dates vary RACHEL CAMPBELL-JOHNSTON
CHINA IN YOUR HANDS...
The best Chinese cultural events nationwide
CHINA LITERATURE NOW
Series of literary events, including Chris Patten hosting a session on May 19 with established and lesser-known writers. Other events include Yan Lianke on freedom of expression and Howard Goldblatt on translation. Southbank Centre, London SE1 (www.southbankcentre.co.uk 0871 663 2501), Feb 9–Jun 7
MANCHESTER CHINESE NEW YEAR
Celebrations include martial arts, acrobatics, Chinese stage magic, a grand parade and lion dance, while street stalls will offer Chinese crafts and food. Various locations, Manchester (www.chinanow.org.uk 020-7396 5340), Feb 10
SOUND OF CHINA – ANCIENT AND MODERN
A concert by the UK Chinese Music Ensemble dedicated to music from the time of the First Emperor. Rarely seen Chinese instruments, such as the guqin, xun and xiao, feature. British Museum, Great Russell Street, London WC1 (www.britishmuseum.org 020-7323 8000), Feb 22
CHINESE CONNECTIONS
Festival offering three different traditions of opera, string music and recitals by Jian Wang and Xuefei Yang. Includes children’s activities and performances. Sage Gateshead, St Mary’s Square (www.thesagegateshead.org 0191-443 4666), Apr 4–6
ONE THOUSAND HANDS BODDHIVISTAS
This production by the China Disabled People’s Performing Art Troupe features 21 hearing-impaired dancers. Various venues (www.china now.org.uk 020-7396 5340), Jun 8–16
TASTE OF CHINA
Try a range of Chinese food and drink while watching Chinese dragon dances, ice-carving and Tai Chi. Regent’s Park, London NW1 (www.royalparks.org.uk 020-7486 7905), Jun 19–22
BBC BIG SCREENS PROJECT
Chinese-themed films and documentaries will be shown on BBC Big Screens at locations around the UK. Various venues (www.china now.org.uk 020-7396 5340), screenings throughout July
CONFUCIUS SAYS
This new children’s opera blends the Analects of Confucius with Chinese folk mythology. Gang Gong, the spirit of water, and Jurong, the spirit of fire, redress the balance of yin and yang in human beings. Hackney Empire, 291 Mare Street, London E8 (www.hackneyempire.co.uk 020-8510 4500), Jul 3-4
HONG KONG RACE DAY
Races include the Hong Kong Jockey Club Sprint. Elsewhere there’s Chinese massage, fortune-telling, kung fu, lion dancing and plate-spinning. Ascot Racecourse, Berkshire (www.ascot.co.uk 0870 7271234), Jul 27
CHINESE TEA CULTURE EXHIBITION
An exploration of China’s history of tea production, including its culture and customs, tea art and the utensils used. Various venues (www.chinanow.org.uk 020-7396 5340), dates TBC SOPHIE DAVIES
...AND FEET
Dance highlights
SUTRA
What happens when the sculptor Antony Gormley and the choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui get together with Buddhist monks from the Shaolin Temple? The result has to be amazing. Sadler’s Wells, Rosebery Avenue, London EC1 (www.sadlerswells.com 0844 4124300), May 27-31
THE NATIONAL BALLET OF CHINA
This Beijing company forms the high point of the China Now dance programme. First up is Bahok, Akram Khan’s collaboration with the troupe; it opens at the Liverpool Playhouse on Mar 7 before touring. Then the full company comes to London to perform Natalia Makarova’s new production of Swan Lake and its own highly theatrical Raise the Red Lantern. Royal Opera House, Bow Street, London WC2 (www.royalopera.org 020-7304 4000) from Jul 28-Aug 2
ACROBATIC SWAN LAKE
Swans on wires and Odette dancing on Siegfried’s head? It must be the Guangdong Acrobatic Troupe with its unusual take on Swan Lake. Royal Opera House (details as above), Aug 4-9 DEBRA CRAINE
品牌人語》通路才是king
【經濟日報╱鄭秋霜 】
2008.01.26 04:40 am
品牌熱潮下,很多想靠文化創意創業的人都想自創品牌。ASO阿瘦皮鞋總經理羅榮岳提醒,想要做品牌的人,創意固然重要,更須認清品牌要有通路支撐,因為「通路是king」。
已經走過55個年頭的阿瘦皮鞋,從2002年的50周年起,將製造委外,轉型專心經營通路、產品開發及品牌行銷,今年1月剛公布的一項品牌大調查,再度蟬連男女鞋理想品牌第一名。
畢業自中原建築系的羅榮岳,是帶領ASO品牌轉型的靈魂人物。他說早年「阿瘦」的品牌名稱,有時可能會讓人質疑它的時尚感,後來經過品牌改造,除了加上英文發音名稱「A.S.O」,不斷強化年輕化與時尚化元素,並透過廣告金句「You A. S. O beautiful」的傳唱,一步步奠定ASO品牌的地位。
羅榮岳認為,不要以為品牌是萬能的,如果沒有布建通路,或通路根本不把你看在眼裡,品牌很難有所成,因為「從來只有聽說通路是king ,很少聽到品牌是king」。
他也以品牌連鎖業的經驗指出,「連鎖業不只要連得快,還要鎖得緊」,環環相扣很重要。因為當你會生產,不代表你會銷售;而如果你行銷的不好,客人就不會上門;這些產業鏈裡的每個環節,創意力、設計力、商品力、行銷力等,每個都很重要,「如果你有哪個部分很弱,那對經營品牌就會很危險」。
2008年1月25日 星期五
2008年1月24日 星期四
米勒《拾穗》、《晚禱》真跡來台
被譽為法國最偉大田園畫家之一的米勒,畢生兩件最經典的作品《拾穗》和《晚禱》
真跡,將於五月底在國立歷史博物館展出。這兩件藝術史上的名作由法國奧塞美術館典
藏,這次來台展出更是是奧塞開館以來,首度同時出借這兩件名畫到國外亮相的首例。
由於《拾穗》和《晚禱》的重要性,這兩幅畫作的單件作品保險額就達一億歐元的天
價。史博館也嚴陣以待兩幅名作登場,除了加強展場恆溼恆溫控管,更向警方尋求廿四
小時的巡邏協助。
米勒生於一八一四年法國的農家,童年時與父親一起在田間勞動,讓他日後對農村和
田園生活特別有感情。他年輕時曾在巴黎學習繪畫,因為厭倦都市生活,一八四九年移
居巴比松,開始以農村生活和田園風光作為創作主題。米勒的成就在於,他將專注工作
的下階層勞動身影,表現出莊嚴崇高的意象,讓他在藝術史上佔有一席之地。
米勒是個嚴謹的藝術家,卅多年的創作生涯裡,只有八十餘件作品傳世。這次來台展
覽的米勒作品共十六件。
《晚禱》描繪一對在馬鈴薯田工作的夫婦,因遠方傳來晚禱鐘聲,暫停手邊農務站在
曠野中祈禱的肅穆身影。《拾穗》則是描繪秋收季節後,窮人在收割過後的田地中撿拾
剩餘麥穗,以求溫飽,畫中三位農婦沐浴在金黃秋陽下,她們曲背彎腰的拾穗形象,有
種神聖之美。
「驚艷米勒─田園之美畫展」借展費一百萬歐元,主要以法國十九世紀巴比松畫派成
員的米勒作品為主,另有同時期重要畫家柯洛、胡梭等其他巴比松畫派成員的作品。七
十件展品中包括四十八件油畫,以及廿二件拍攝十九世紀農村生活的原版攝影記錄。
2008年1月22日 星期二
The new Marc Quinn
Marc Quinn has stopped making work about himself and started focusing on other lives. Our correspondent meets the once Young British Artist who grew up
Marc Quinn with one of the bright flower paintings from his White Cube show
When, in the early 1980s, Marc Quinn was still a reluctant art and art-history undergraduate at Cambridge, his contemporaries called him Mad Marc behind his back, an allusion to his intense stare and long flowing hair – the hair of an aspirant Viking, a fellow student told me.
Since then, the man, the stare and the hair have altered radically. The more cemented his reputation, the more subdued, confident – perhaps more grown-up – the artist has become. He has agreed to talk toThe Times about his show, Evolution, which opens this week, and, perhaps tellingly, also to Tatler, which has photographed the artist in aHello!-style portrait with his wife Georgia Byng (sister of the Canongate Books founder, Jamie, and daughter of “a successful Establishment figure” – Thomas Byng, the Eighth Earl of Strafford). We also learn that Quinn attended the boarding school Millfield and that prices for his forthcoming work are expected to reach £700,000. “It is what it is,” Quinn says, and later: “Obviously we live in a media world.”
Those who knew him in the late 1980s will remember a man crazy for drinking. But since 1993 alcohol and, subsequently, cigarettes have been banished; the hair has been cropped short at the sides and razed by a baldness gene on top; he goes to the gym. The temperament, too, has changed – although he denies this. A journalist interviewing him in 2000 describes him as “paranoid”, and, in the years between “mad” and “paranoid”, the word most often used to sum him up was “self-obsessed”. How could he not be, it was reasoned – all he ever did was sculpt images of himself: an imprint of his body in latex; his naked form in lead.
The breakthrough piece, shown at Young British Artists II, and later sold by Charles Saatchi for £1.5 million, was called Self, a cast of his head in nine pints of his own blood. “Outlandishness can’t make up for witlessness,” was the art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon’s verdict at the time. “The head-shaped plasma ice-lolly has novelty appeal, and that is about it.”
He made self-portraits with his own excrement, and of his own erect penis. In retrospect Quinn says of that period: “I find it slightly embarrassing to have used myself as a model, because people inevitably think it’s some kind of egotism or that it’s about confession or self-analysis, and that wasn’t really what it was about. It was about having yourself as the most available model and also as a starting point.”
Of the YBAs – if we can still call them that now that they’re in their forties – Quinn is reputedly the least obnoxious and the most self-contained, still churning out the work and raking in the accolades but no longer living the stereo-typical artist’s life at full tilt – “a gossip-free zone” one curator told me.
He doesn’t seem remotely self-obsessed to me. Nor creepily intense. Serious and focused would be more suitable adjectives, as well as unshakably confident (he’s all for allowing oneself the possibility of failure as an artist but “I don’t think I’ve ever failed”. ). He arrives at his immaculate white studio from the foundry in a bright red boiler suit and promptly changes into fresh clothes to give me the tour of his work for his White Cube show.
Another Times journalist once described Quinn as emanating the aura of a web or graphic-designer and I think that’s accurate. He’s 43 and wears combat trousers, the badge of all men over a certain age in creative industries; his fingernails are clean. Patiently he answers my questions. On why he gave up alcohol in 1993: “Because I wanted to live rather than die, I suppose.” On Brian Sewell: “It would be terrifying to get a good review from him, wouldn’t it?” On having failed his art O Level (for which he submitted two shoes and an airplane sick bag filled with concrete): “I just think art is not something you can put through an exam because anything interesting is exactly what they wouldn’t want in an exam.”
He never graduated from Cambridge because by the time he’d been accepted he’d worked with the sculptor Barry Flanagan and knew that he wanted to be an artist. Two years later he met the gallery owner Jay Jopling and within a decade he’d made his mark.
After the self-portraits, Quinn produced an eclectic, predominantly figurative body of work that some critics say has been inconsistent in quality – a giant sculpture of Darth Vader’s head and casts of dead animals were received lukewarmly. And the kindest thing I can think to say about his chocolate sculpture of Delia Smith’s head is that at least it was biodegradable.
But then he’s back with a strangely lovely frozen garden consisting of plants that could never grow together in nature. His cast of his own son Lucas’s head caused ripples because Quinn had made it with his son’s Magimixed afterbirth. He claims to be surprised that his work with blood or faeces or placenta has been described as unsettling or macabre. “We’re so alienated from the biological reality of our insides, we’re very happy that the cultural reality we’ve formed is the only reality, and sometimes things that make you question that are uncomfortable, and they go ugggh.
“I don’t make things to shock people,” he insists. “I didn’t make it to get a reaction, I made it to have an emotional contact with people, and everybody’s going to have a personal reaction.”
Quinn’s most famous work is his sculpture of the pregnant Alison Lapper, a woman with no arms and shortened legs due to a chromosomal condition, which stood in Trafalgar Square for 20 months. It delighted the disabled lobby and dismayed traditionalists, who accused Quinn of left-wing sentimentality, didactism or exploitation. One critic compared it unflatteringly to a bar of soap on the Today programme, but the public seemed to like it. “Even people who were sceptical came round to it,” Quinn says. “It did all the things I wanted it to do.”
This piece, in turn, inspired his sculptures of Kate Moss in knotted yoga poses. “Kate Moss is this image of what’s supposedly the perfect looking person and yet the image that’s multiplied everywhere is one that not even she can live up to, let alone everybody else.” This year he will unveil Siren at the British Museum, a solid gold version of one of the Kate Moss sculptures, which will cost £1.5 million to make. Most tellingly, while Kate Moss is selling, the Lapper has yet to find a home and is due to go on tour, possibly to India. “It just shows, whatever people say, they prefer a more beautiful image to a more challenging one.”
I think it’s impossible to enjoy Quinn’s work in isolation, and that’s why I’ve left what is in his new show until last. There are huge, bright paintings of flowers that in nature could never grow together; more flowers, this time cast in bronze, strange hybrid plants, from which dangle orchid flowers, tomatoes and apples, and then finished to resemble something plucked out of an oil slick. “They’re all flowers bought in the shop on the same day,” he explains. “So it’s this idea that seasons don’t exist, that human desire has made things available at all times of the year.”
At home Quinn eats organic and GM-free food. Is his work intended as a warning? “No, I don’t want to be moral,” he says. “I’m anxious for humans but not for nature. Because I think nature will always work out in some way.”
The show’s centrepiece are nine enormous pink marble statues of the human embryo as it charts its course from conception to birth. “I was interested in the whole morphology of all our bodies and having made sculptures of people like Alison Lapper, and people looking at it and thinking she’s got a very different sort of a body, I was thinking, well, every single person who’s looking at that has looked much stranger and more different.
“What’s interesting to me is when matter becomes alive. In a way it’s the opposite of death, where somebody dies, they go wherever they go and you don’t know. In the beginning you’ve got the sperm and the egg and suddenly, nine months later, there’s a human being. That evolution of life from matter is what I’ve always found fascinating.”
I’m not sure if they work on their own but these pieces are part of a natural progression. If you’ve seen Quinn’s genomic portrait of the genetic scientist Sir John Sulston, for example, or if you’ve looked at the blood heads and the Alison Lappers, you’ll see a strong pattern emerging. Then you might start to disagree with the Graham-Dixons of this world or the people at Cambridge who wrote him off as insane.
2008年1月21日 星期一
極品女人的身體
2008-01-21
向田邦子的《午夜的玫瑰》散文集裡,有〈男人鑑賞八法〉,寫了八位知名男性在她觀察
之下,迷人之處在哪兒。我看了覺得很有趣,心想我也來寫個男人鑑賞八法吧!然繼而一
想,我至今唯一一次上雜誌封面,就被下標題為「我對台灣男人死了心」(好恐怖!平凡
無趣的我的人生情節也可以下此聳動的標題!不,不該說好恐怖,該說好天才,寫那標題
的人。)我的確想不出有什麼能讓我鑑賞的台灣男人的名單,想到腦袋都快破了。好吧!
那我寫「女人鑑賞八法」好了。前提是要能寫出這個人特別的魅力,我一定要對其有感覺
才行,那麼標準是什麼呢?什麼樣的女人會讓我覺得她是這種獨特、由衷讓人喜歡的女人
呢?想了半天,我發現有個極重要的標準,就是這個人一定要讓人感覺舒服,如果這個人
讓你感覺舒服,我覺得八九不離十,一定不會錯,她是有這個價值的女人。
然而訂出這個標準後,到底有誰符合呢?我馬上想到一個,而且一時還想不到第二個,那
個女人,就是許芳宜。
之後我碰到許悔之,他在主持一個電視節目,《悔之私樂園》,我問他訪問過那麼多名人
,包括政治人物、學者、意見領袖、藝術家,誰讓他感覺最好?許悔之毫不猶豫地回答:
「許芳宜。」
「許芳宜這個人,一走出來就讓人覺得她在發光。」他這麼說。
許芳宜的自傳書《我怕我和世界不一樣》(天下文化)中提到,曾有人說她一站在台上,就
讓人感到在發光,她聽了還笑說,又不是變魔術。
她自己不知道她會變魔術呢!不只是在舞台上,就算是平平凡凡站在眼前,也會發光(雖
然我是沒見過她本人)。
雖然我不太敢想像國內有人不知道許芳宜是誰,但還是說明一下,許芳宜是瑪莎葛蘭姆舞
團第一個台灣首席舞者,而且是極罕見地在進入五團短短四年就升上首席舞者的位置,其
詮釋瑪莎作品的精湛高度,被譽為「瑪莎葛蘭姆傳人」,去年她和編舞家布拉瑞揚成立「
拉芳‧LAFA」舞團,說她是當今現代舞界受到全世界矚目的明星,並不為過。
這本書由許芳宜口述,採訪撰述者林蔭庭自承對舞蹈陌生,稱之為「文字人與身體人的交
會」。
文字人與身體人說的好,因為文字人跟身體人是完全不同的人種,不只是兩個不同的領域
,而是兩種完全不同的哲學。相通之處當然是有的,我們對自己沒有經歷的人生,都是只
能採取挪借想像的方法,但有些核心的、本質上的挪借,卻是不可能的。
身體人最「身體」的部份,其實不是文字人用「文字」可以想像的,儘管文字人的工具是
文字,身體人的工具是身體,但絕對不可能工具就是工具,不同的工具永遠不能用同樣的
方式想像。若不是我從八歲的時候開始學芭蕾(學得很爛,唯一能驕傲的只不過是零零落
落學到現在,沒有把它丟掉),我熱中研究武術,我對身體的藝術很癡迷,而我常年守在
文字的神殿,我是身體和文字兩個聖域的敬拜者,是堆砌這不同大教堂的最虔畏、忠誠、
頂禮行儀的工匠,我就不會這麼說。身體是活物,是魔物,是聖器也是魔鬼,是一隻要去
馴服操縱的妖獸,是每一秒鐘在變化的終極異形,是天人法術的皮囊,是萬物真理微縮在
此的宇宙,巧奪天工精妙到你終其一生無法參透的神秘受造物,沒有修練過身體的人,用
想像的方式去揣摩對身體的修練,絕對是緣木求魚。
許芳宜真的是把自己的身體鍛練到一個超凡的境界。即使是職業舞者,都有很多可能只把
自己的身體鍛練到一個「夠用」的狀態,但是我覺得許芳宜讓自己遠遠超過那個界線。我
在想,為什麼許芳宜會發光呢?跟她的智慧、個性、思想有關,但是跟她的身體可能更有
關,她的身體有很豐沛飽滿的能量,那個能量時常處在釋放的狀態,就好像恆星一樣,會
以光的形式發送出來。
你可能會以為許芳宜有多三頭六臂,不過看這本書了解許芳宜,她很平凡、普通,在宜蘭
一個樸實的家庭長大,這樣一個家庭給她的教養,是單純、誠懇、正直、腳踏實地的。許
芳宜常提當年羅斯老師給她的鼓勵,對她有很大的影響,確實人在學習過程,被肯定是非
常重要的事,不過書裡沒提,許芳宜自己也從沒說過的是,很顯然她身上就是有別人沒有
的一種東西,萬中選一的,被稱之為「天才」的那種成分,她絕不可能平白無故在人生每
一個習舞階段,都「碰巧」被人為最有潛能,表現最突出,她從來沒說過那是什麼,她的
表現跟別人差別在哪,她為什麼被認為最「不一樣」,但很顯然的,她就是「不一樣」,
她就是有利用自己這副身體傳遞那最具有力量的神祕事物的媒介的天才。她擁有很強烈的
自覺性,很快的直覺反應,能馬上找到「這裡有問題」,然後解開,繼續行進,不著痕跡
。
許芳宜「令人羨慕」。
我相信這四個字說出來沒人反對,但我就是要說,「令人羨慕」這四個字很差勁。「與年
輕朋友的交流當中,最讓我感慨的是經常聽到他們說:『你好幸運喔,我好羨慕你。』羨
慕我擁有舞者的先天條件,羨慕我能出國,羨慕我能有國際知名度…」這麼說的都是各種
藝術學系的年輕人。但許芳宜聽到這種問題總是很疑惑:為什麼他們總是羨慕我?
對啊,你這麼依賴「幸運」嗎?如果一個想成為作家的年輕人跑來這麼跟我說的話,我一
定會不耐煩地叫他趕快丟掉筆,隨便你要去賣蚵仔麵線或幹嘛都行,那麼想依賴幸運的人
是廢物。
的確,許芳宜天生有好舞者條件。有些人生來甚至不健全,但即使是完全健康,體型正常
的人,都不見得適合跳舞,舞蹈藝術除了對身體的比例有嚴苛要求(不過現代舞因為形式
自由,身體的形狀比例已不再重要,有些舞團甚至特別喜歡比例畸形的舞者)外,很微細
的身體構造(內在、外在)也有巨大的影響,這些都是天生的,很難靠後天努力去改變、去
打破、去克服(有可能你比別人百倍努力,但仍比那佔先天優勢的人差一點,他能輕鬆做
到的事,你要靠吃上無窮盡苦來得到),卡爾拉格斐在《時尚大帝》這部紀錄片中說,這
行業(時尚業,他特別指的是模特兒)就是不公平,相信公平的人不要來。如果時尚業不公
平,那舞蹈更是不公平了。再加上後天的運氣,許芳宜其實不算運氣有特別好,但她看起
來確實比很多人順遂。但只看運氣的人,是瞎子。我是說真的。
神給世人的運氣,其實是相等的。當你不明白自己在人生旅程中應該體驗的東西是什麼的
時候,你就看不見這相等的意義。我們的智識只限於此生,因此往往看不出某些痛苦的用
處,但我們的靈魂是記得所有輪迴所學習的課程的,當有一天我們能得到超越一切的宏觀
的時候,就能明白每一個體驗的意義。但我們侷限在狹隘的無知並非是我們對著別人命運
的表象流口水而不知道自己的正經事該幹嘛的藉口。
瑪莎葛蘭姆說:「身體不會說謊。」
我從自己學舞的經驗,舞者每天都在和自己的身體「進行對話」,所以最能強烈體會「身
體不會說謊」的真理,舞者每日的練習,等於是對全身每一吋肌肉筋骨進行最精微的測試
,能發覺任何一個小地方與昨日的不同,有時後原因很明確,有時候不詳,但每件事都是
騙不了人的,在自己的身體種的因,一定會有果,沒有僥倖也沒有障眼法,因為那套法則
就是牢不可破的,就像風吹起一張紙,就像一顆石頭激起漣漪,就像雨從葉片掉落地上。
身體的誠實是你無法操弄的,但頭腦可以不誠實,連心也可以不誠實,心不誠實,會反映
在身體上,若要讓身體是完美的,心就必須學習誠實地面對他人跟自己。許芳宜說待人處
世若不是那麼一回事,到了台上身體的表現自動會洩底,身體的表現會呈現你是一個什麼
樣的人。這很有趣。要呈現大氣風姿,本身的修行就必須有此氣度,身體修行與心的修行
的一致性,是一種古老思想。舞者修行與武者修行很像,心與身的修練是不能分開的。
這書裡有件事,我不提絕對會不舒坦到極點,就是許芳宜和布拉瑞揚的交往。兩個人是大
學同學,布拉晚一年,所以是許芳宜大二時兩個人開始交往,一直到今天。布拉瑞揚是原
住民,在當時,平地人與原住民還是互有成見(到今天我也不認為有變得多好,只不過是
因為原住民被拿來當政治工具,一天到晚被抬出來特別關愛),許芳宜為家庭壓力感到困
擾,她看到的布拉瑞揚,就是一個有獨特魅力,在眾人之中分外耀目的一個年輕人,一個
有吸引她的才華的,和他在一起她覺得彼此能相知相學習成長茁壯的可貴伴侶,「我看布
拉,就是當成一個『人』來看,我只看到這個人身上的才華讓我驚艷,就認定他了,其餘
都不重要。」她說。
已經成為國際巨星級舞蹈家的現代許芳宜,前年在紐約借住一位白人老太太家,但只因為
她的黃皮膚,被門房(不只一個)視為外勞女傭般予歧視侮辱的無理對待。他們有眼不識泰
山倒在其次,休葛蘭也有沒被酒吧保鑣認出而拒絕他進入的經驗(好像還被打了?),但看
到有色人種就認為他一定低等,就好像你在台灣看到東南亞女人,直覺就會認為她是佣人
,而不會是國際知名的女科學家。
但科學家也沒有比女佣高等,舞蹈家也未必就比外勞高貴,人的本質,以作為一個「人」
來看,是平等的,應該被一視同仁的。不同種族、不同身分、不同背景、不同標籤的人,
只把他當作一個單純的「人」來看,這是打破一切藩籬最根本的辦法,可是很奇怪馬英九
講一字不差的話,可以被陳水扁拿來大罵,一國元首連「人」的話都聽不懂,我好驚訝我
們可以給這個智能讓人擔憂的人當了八年總統,好危險!國人真是好自立自強。
在談許芳宜這樣美麗的女人,舞蹈這樣美好的藝術的同時,最後要談到這些東西,實在令
人討厭,但是不提心裡的憤怒卻很難平息。關於國內舞蹈界的困境,許芳宜的態度讓人感
到很心疼,她其實也心疼所有為舞蹈在努力的人,但她不會用抱怨的態度,她覺得踩在前
人努力的成果上,應該更要求自己,而不是去責怪。曾在北藝大授課的許芳宜,很意外台
灣的舞蹈科系學生其潛力與他們所受的札實訓練帶來的可觀成績,我記得我自己第一次看
北藝大學生的表演,也大受震撼,不知道原來我們的年輕人等級是這樣高的程度,我聽說
北藝大的學生畢業,到世界各一流的舞團面試,都被認定他們擁有那樣資格,他們吃了我
們難以想像的苦,在人生最精華的歲月,放棄同年齡人有的玩樂,一心在鑽研舞蹈藝術和
鍛鍊自己上,使他們能出類拔萃。但是反觀我們的國家做了什麼?這幾年看到舞蹈團體的
苦境,尋求贊助時的可憐,這些驕傲美麗的人種,藝術家都應該是驕傲的,因為神把美麗
的奇蹟賜與他們,讓他們用他們的身體現這個奇蹟給世人,他們應該、也必須為他們所崇
敬、堅持、守護的事物而驕傲的,但是他們卻得卑躬屈膝、低聲下氣地對待、討好贊助商
、無知懶惰的媒體、有時候是噁爛的官僚機構,這實在太殘忍。
更令人憤怒的是,我們的藝術家到國外去靠自己的本事奮鬥,不忘做國民外交,我們的外
交人員到了外面,非但不幫忙,反而淨扯後腿,相貌難看,丟人現眼,不知禮儀,而在國
內國外,凡事只有能當政治工具操弄的,對他們才有意義。至於你藝術家的死活,他才不
管你,你過去創造過多少人類的奇蹟,他會看得懂那才是奇怪。
台灣的土壤能培養出世界級的好舞者,這是感動得令人發抖的事,卻養不了這些好舞者,
這是多可悲的事。
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本文轉自中時部落格
http://blog.chinatimes.com/indiacheng/archive/2008/01/21/237845.html
2008年1月20日 星期日
Bryan Appleyard on art on the web
Tired of pop, porn and celebrity prattle online? That’s not all the web is good for. From Bach to Beckett, it’s now a gold mine for lovers of highbrow art, too
Go to town.hall.org/radio/HarperAudio and click on Wallace Stevens. Click on the first file. You will hear the voice of Stevens in old age reading The Idea of Order at Key West, one of the most perfect poems of our time – no, of any time. A shiver ran down my spine when I first did this. I’d never heard Stevens’s voice before.
Not into poetry? Okay, go to YouTube and put “Picasso” in the search box. Click on the video entitled “Picasso is painting . . .” You will see a scene from a French documentary, showing a wry, half-naked Picasso dashing off a very odd picture. You prefer the history of ideas? Input “Foucault Chomsky”. The first video shows Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky debating on Dutch television – well, not so much debating as conducting competing monologues. As dated and absurd as a tank top, this, nevertheless, is the authentic sight and sound of two deluded giants of postwar thought attempting to make history. Or put in Heifetz and watch that great violinist play the Bach Chaconne. Or put in Samuel Beckett and watch Jeremy Irons perform Ohio Impromptu. Or – superb, this – put in “Lee Marvin John Ford”. The first video will show you the actor explaining how Ford got the best out of his cast in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a sublime movie.
The internet is now 19 years old – dating its inception as a mass medium from Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the world wide web in 1989 – and it is finally growing up. Popularly, and more or less correctly, it is still assumed to be dominated by geeks, porn, stoned students and assorted hucksters. It is also correct to assume that it is, not to put too fine a point on it, “full of crap”. Bonkers blogs, corporate/political hype and the whole undifferentiated melee of bad pop, worse television and inane celebribabble still make surfing the net a slightly less culturally respectable activity than watching The Big Food Fight on Channel 4. But something has changed. Basically, this is because of the techie phenomenon known as Web 2.0 – more interactivity, more user-generated content – and the failings of mainstream media. The first we can take for granted; the second may be less immediately obvious.
In an important article, Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, observed: “Between 1980 and 2000, classical music more or less disappeared from American network television, magazines and other mainstream media, its products deemed too elitist, effete or esoteric for the world of pop.” The same applies to all expressions of high culture. Over the past 20 years, the increasing power of marketing and advertising over editorial has driven the mainstream ever further downmarket. I know, in the midst of this decline, we get quality pop products such as The Simpsons and so on, and I know there are plenty of specialist outlets. But that is not the point. Much that should be routinely available is excluded from the mainstream, crowded out by the short-term demands of the bottom line. The fear is that this crowding-out will lead to a severe case of what Clive James calls “cultural amnesia”: starved of popular acceptance and in a climate of perpetual novelty, high art will simply be forgotten.
Riding to the rescue is, first, an economic theory. The phrase “the long tail” was coined by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine. Order an obscure book from Amazon and, with luck, it will arrive the following day. This is worthwhile to Amazon because there are millions of obscure books, and, even if there is only one customer for each, that is still millions of customers. In other words, technology makes it possible – Amazon needs only a web page, not a shop – to profit from the previously ignored “long tail” of the sales graph. It is thus no more difficult to buy Claire Guimond’s recording of Telemann’s Fantasias for Flute Without Bass on iTunes than it is to buy the latest by Arctic Monkeys. There are many arguments about the significance of the long tail, but I was once told by a Waterstone’s executive that it was nonsense, so it must be true.
The second saviour of high culture is an aspect of Web 2.0: interactivity. People put comments on YouTube videos. One clip on it is a reading of Stevens’s The Snow Man – there seems to be some dispute over whether this is Stevens’s voice or not – over shots of a snowbound landscape. Here is one of the comments: “There are a certain very few things [sic] in this world that keep me alive, almost compel me to live just by popping into my mind at the very last moment, in spite of the most unbelievable suffering that I cannot put into words: the poetry of Wallace Stevens is one of these things.” I’m with you, franco6719, aged 40, from Italy.
The point here is that the consumers of the long tail are no longer alone. This often produces the most gratifying results. I mentioned the novelist Marilynne Robinson on my blog once. A writer in LA immediately asked me what he should read. A couple of hours later, he came back to tell me he’d bought her novel Gilead and read a few pages. I was right, he said: she is a genius. Or try a site called The Garden of Forking Paths (gfp.typepad.com/the_garden_of_ forking_pat ). This is a philosophical discussion blog, largely about free will. I got involved with this for a while, then had to stop, realising I would have to devote most of my days to keeping up. Then again, why not? There are many such blogs. Find them by visiting Technorati.com. It’s slow, clunky and poor on updating, but it scans most of the almost 100m blogs of the world.
Interactivity gives the long-tailers two huge benefits. First, it frees them from the prison of the mainstream and having, for example, to wait for years to see a television documentary on Wallace Stevens or Jascha Heifetz. Now they can find the material whenever they like. Second, it gives them what they need most if they are to survive – community, a sense of belonging to something other than the culture of mere distraction.
The final and most obvious boost to seriousness on the net is scale. Download speeds are now fast enough to make streaming video and audio easy. More important, the net itself is now so vast that, to a rough approximation, everything is there somewhere. This transforms the nature of knowledge and expertise. Say that a few words from a poem come into your mind. Type them into Google and you’ll have the whole poem in a fraction of a second. Ten – or even five – years ago, you would have been clutching your head for hours. Apply this to the visual arts and we can get rid of those awful headphone sets galleries provide. Much more can be learned about a painting by simply firing up your iPhone while standing in front of it. All the gallery need do is provide WiFi: not much to ask.
We risk drowning in this info-ocean, however. Knowing everything is not much different from knowing nothing. Judgment, therefore, rather than brute fact-finding, is the key. The trick is to narrow your focus, to decide exactly what you want to know and to refine your sense of what is serious and what is not. This is not easy. It takes time. You can lose hours taking nonsense seriously.
So, here are a few serious net delights – there are millions of others. The contemporary visual arts are, predictably, well served: the net is, after all, primarily a visual medium. Frieze is now as much of an online presence as it is an art fair. Frieze.com tells you more than you need to know about contemporary art. Should this inspire you to become an artist, you can register at Saatchi Online and instantly expose your work to the world. Failing that, the site is an extraordinary glimpse into what people, rightly or wrongly, think is art these days. With Banksy, the site becomes the art; banksy.co.uk is studiedly cool and offhand, but funny.
Music is now sensationally well served. The record label Naxos (at www.naxos.com ) is challenging the iTunes download model with a subscription system that gives access to its entire catalogue for $19.95 (£10) a year. Alex Ross pointed me to two amazing sites, www.schoenberg.at, an exquisite shrine to the composer – I love the idea of his work being available on a web “jukebox” – and keepingscore.org, the site of the San Francisco Symphony. This gives web, radio and even pages where you can follow the score of the music being played bar by bar.
Right, now you want to learn the violin. You can at theviolinsite.com . Once you’re getting good, check your progress at music-scores.com – all the sheet music, and what it sounds like.
Literature, thanks in part to Amazon, was the art that first took off on the net. There are thousands of good book sites and blogs. Books, Inq is a blog produced by Frank Wilson, the literary editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, which assiduously points you in the direction of countless literary links. Jenny Diski (jennydiski.typepad.com ) and Susan Hill (blog.susan-hill.com ) produce good examples of writer’s blogs, though the latter recently made the rooky blogger’s mistake of including pictures of her cats. And there are thousands of highbrow literary fan sites and blogs. To stay with Stevens, try The Dao of Wallace Stevens. I recently found, to my amazement, that there was a blog devoted entirely to the great Edwardian literary agent JB Pinker (pinkertheliteraryagent.blogspot.com ). And there are two big literary sites that work as guides to the book net (complete-review.com and readingtheworld.org ).
I could go on, but the point is clear: it’s all out there, from a video of Heidegger on YouTube to all the sheet music you’ll ever need for your euphonium at music-scores.com. The web is what you make it, the long tail is what matters, and all you need to make sense of it is what Stevens called a “blessed rage for order”. And you don’t have to take my word for it – you can hear him say it now.