Hauser and Wirth’s announcement of a new show of paintings by Anj Smith has this reviewer wondering about The Gothic in contemporary art. Smith’s paintings (to quote the press release) “explore the connections between art, mysticism, female agency and philosophy” —they feature fantastic landscapes, explorations of the psyche, references to myth, invented creatures and objects, ethereal figures deep shadow, and forms of chiaroscuro shading that look like bruising, in other words, they are darkly surreal. What they are not, or perhaps where they are not, is “Dark Surrealism”—that genre-ghetto on the outskirts of the fine art mainstream where painters who used to be tattoo artists work in oil for a few hundred dollars a canvas that makes blue chip gallerists turn up their noses and speed off as fast as they can.
And one might well ask (and I mean no disrespect to Smith’s fascinatingly subtle work here) why not? An image like, say, False Steward (2019), a profoundly haunted “portrait” whose features become a melange of deep-sea-like forms in Leonora-Carrington-colors on black, could easily serve as an album cover for any black-clad chanteuse you care to name. Trope Disco (2017), a blasted landscape featuring a skeletal figure confronting a classic man-in-the-moon face would be quite at home as a 1970s Penguin science-fiction paperback cover, not miles different in form or content from something like illustrator Ian Miller’s Death In The Rocking Horse Factory (1976).
A common response here might have the word “intent” in it, as in “the intent of the work is different.” But that seems genuinely untrue, an interview with Smith sounds much like an interview with any other scythe-and-star merchant “I used to draw these underground mazes layer upon layer upon layer,” Smith told a reporter at The Independent “I was drawing these intricate maps that were quite dark with flames.” She talks about environmentalism, Hieronymous Bosch and vanitas paintings, so do they. A more honest analysis would seem to involve pitch. Smith is using many of the same instruments as the goth band next door, but the nightmare mood isn’t taken for granted. One might find any given Anj Smith painting creepy, but before that it might be more obviously autumnal, funny, nostalgic, fascinated.
A greater question looms, does mere variety of affect make them inherently more complex than their more reliably depressed cousins? And if not, why does the art world treat them as such?
Fine art collectors are usually older than artists and have the anxious tastes of the winter years: they think about death but fear its approach more than ever, they are as intrigued by sex as anyone else but uncomfortable with anything sexier than they feel, and they are desperate for a sense of sophistication to replace all that they’ve given up or lost. For all of these reasons, embracing art associated with youthful subcultures (even if these subcultures have lasted far longer than anyone’s youth) is always a difficult proposition. There may be a time when artists like Emil Melmoth or David Stoupakis are recognized alongside those less willing to choose a skull as the iconography of first resort, but I am not holding my breath.
Image: Courtesy Hauser and Wirth