The White Pube

Particular Books, 2024, 320 pp.

Poor Artists by The White Pube, the collaborative identity of Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente, is a compelling object. Its flamingo pink cover is a flamboyant addition to my bookcase. The London and Liverpool-based critics have been writing bombastic online criticism, filled with emojis, abbreviations, and feelings, since 2015 and graciously, this content has largely been free for readers to consume. Following nine years of producing weekly blog posts, reflecting on exhibitions, art institutions, and visual culture more broadly, the pair have published their first book with Particular Books, an imprint of Penguin. Poor Artists is a material translation of the online community they have earnestly created, capturing the agitator spirit they have come to represent for their readership.  

The book narrates the endeavours of fictional art school graduate, Quest Talukdar, as they attempt to pursue a career as an artist after college. The difficulties of maintaining a creative life under capitalism are made immediately apparent to the protagonist. Grappling with the divide between the positives of art education and its frustrating incompatibility with societal structures, The White Pube expresses a similar criticism put forward by Claire-Louise Bennett in her novel, Checkout19 (Penguin Random House, 2021) which portrays the empty promises of the schooling system for working-class children. The core tension of Poor Artists – how we can live with art in our lives – remains largely unresolved, but I take some comfort in the fact that the protagonist ultimately decides to continue life as an artist, in spite of countless obstacles, and is buoyed by their reimagining of ‘success’ as simply being able to ‘make’.

The overt naming of the protagonist ‘Quest’ is one of many examples of the writers’ playful and expanded approach to criticism, which straddles different literary genres. The book is at times a memoir, with Quest an amalgamation of the authors’ own backgrounds, while also embracing fantasy and fiction, complete with tropes of quest-narratives, including a knight and king. A particularly enjoyable sequence analyses the role of art school in the development of criticality, with a surreal depiction of the head of the college as a pile of discarded artworks that its students have progressed through. At times, the writers eschew formalism altogether and embrace the polemical, with character monologues espousing opinions on topical conversations, from ableism to anarchism. The book is informed by interviews, conducted with anonymised individuals, artists, curators and gallerists, and this construction is evident in the strong opinions of different characters. 

A critique levelled at Poor Artists by ArtReview suggests that publishing with a mainstream press like Penguin undercuts the book’s articulation of anarchist ideals.¹ This seems misguided, given that we operate within particular power structures, and publishing is a method of disseminating  ideas that can be activated. It is perhaps more productive to consider what it means to have this strange book – a hybrid of different writing styles – accepted by conventional media. Muhammad and de la Puente are both art school graduates, and while this is a well-established career path for many critics, I am intrigued by the creativity of this book. 

The dematerialisation of the art object, as prognosed by Lucy Lippard in the 1970s, did not blanketly occur. However, Poor Artists highlights financial situations in determining the pursuit of material-focused or ‘dematerialised’ practices (de la Puente’s college loans are cited in footnotes throughout the narrative). 

Oscar Wilde’s The Critic as Artist (1891) was an early originator of the school of thought that viewed criticism as an art form in and of itself, describing it as a “record of one’s own soul.” Poor Artists adopts this idea wholly by creating its own form and rationale. For many reasons, the fields of art writing and creative criticism have seen renewed interest in recent years. The general distribution of this book platforms these timely modes of creative expression for broader readerships to engage with and experience.

By converting the dominant ideas, discussed on their website and media channels, into the materiality of a book, The White Pube has created a talisman, a record of collective discordance with the opportunities for pursuing a life with art. In a way, the most appropriate review of this book would be to survey an array of practitioners – the eponymous ‘poor artists’ that the book seeks to champion and address. The interviews that inform the book demonstrate The White Pube’s community-oriented approach to criticism, with Poor Artists reaffirming their allegiance to their readership and the makers of the world. 

Sarah Long is an artist and writer based in Cork.

sarahlongartist.com

¹ Rosanna McLaughlin, ‘‘Poor Artists’ by Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad, Reviewed’, ArtReview, October 2024.

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There is a glossy exuberance to how people dress in Dublin right now, markedly different from how we all looked a few weeks or months earlier, shuffling between home and the supermarket. Emerging from a pandemic – back to studios and exhibition openings – means a change in how we present to the world and how we dress for work, even if we are only re-describing our work selves to ourselves. We are all changed, and we may choose to signal those changes, and the possibilities they open up, through what we wear.

A graphic designer friend often wears a pencil in his top pocket. He doesn’t really use it, but the pencil reminds him and his clients that his work is based in craft. Another friend, an artist who works mainly in video, describes how she cuts her nails before a big project, a residual ritual from her training in ceramics.  

In Charlie Porter’s new book, What Artists Wear, a number of artists describe an attachment to a particular item of clothing worn in the studio; others, Frida Kahlo or Picasso for example, are identifiable by a particular clothing item or style. The studio wear is often an old garment that used to be worn ‘out’, or workwear from another making or fixing based profession, adapted so that it is fit-for-purpose. Sometimes it involves wearing the same garment repeatedly until it takes on a role, similar to but not exactly like Winnicott’s description of a transitional object, a ‘blankey’ or comfort item that has accumulated smells and patinas from previous work.1

How is what artists wear different enough from what other people wear to merit special attention? How artists wear clothes is often imagined as stemming either from a desire for flamboyance or unconcern (or accidentally flamboyant unconcern), close to the common portrayal of a preoccupied professor as ‘nutty’. Porter’s book undoes this with careful concern, both for the clothing and the wearer. Where he doesn’t know the artist and what they tended to wear, he visits their clothing and picks over it for us or elicits a reliable testimony from someone observant and close. This is how we discover that Joseph Beuys’s (often emulated) hat functioned as a way to cover over a metal plate in his head, which used to get cold. 

Early on, Porter identifies a ‘defiance’ in relation to how artists wear clothes, but it could also be considered ‘taking liberties’ with materials, etiquette, and status. There are descriptions of crusty patches on cashmere, paint splattered overalls under Comme des Garçons suits, and Agnes Martin’s fittingly quilted Sears and Roebuck work jacket, all of which demonstrate a particular approach to suitability or appropriateness.

There’s a slippery cliché that artists are class-migrators. Porter addresses this by looking at some of artists’ clothing as workwear, clothing for making, often borrowed or hacked from other labours. Porter notes Andy Warhol’s switch from the chinos he always wore, to black jeans and then to blue jeans which were a more legible link to his working-class, middle American roots, as well as ubiquitous city wear.

Bill Cunningham, the photographer and chronicler of fashion in New York, dressed unfailingly in a blue workers’ jacket from the French department store, BHV. Described as ‘bleu de travail’, it was picked up for about 10 euro in a DIY shop in Paris and functioned as a personal uniform – specific but unremarkable – which afforded Cunningham the possibility of gliding from streets to runway shows as he documented what other people wore, the jacket’s handy pockets filled with film and lenses. After Cunningham died in 2016, photographers gathered at New York Fashion week wearing versions of the blue jacket (now known as ‘The Bill’) as a tribute. Cunningham must have known that this might happen. 

In What Artists Wear, Porter often writes in a long ellipsis, gently returning us to an item of clothing in a way that defines how its symbolism has altered. Yves Klein wears a tuxedo while a group of women, employed by him, performatively imprint their body shape in his patented Blue onto canvas or a wall. General Idea had parodied this in Shut the Fuck Up (1985), where we see a rather abject stuffed poodle covered in blue paint spinning in front of a large painted X. Porter takes the menace in the distance and power-signalling of Klein’s tuxedo seriously – “Tailoring is not neutral”, he notes. Much later, after having described the queering/querying of the male power suit by Georgia O’Keefe and Gilbert and George, he remarks on how David Hammons oils his own clothed body, leaving the bluish imprint of his jeans on the paper.  

Mark Leckey spoke about ‘casuals’ in Temple Bar Gallery + Studios a few years ago and his film, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), documents this form of dress, as worn at Northern Soul events. For Leckey and his peers, casual clothing was something that could only be worn by the ‘well-off’ and so labels like Fiorucci became desirable as a way to overturn this. Charlotte Prodger worries on the possibility of appearing queer in a rural setting, where the nuances of what she is wearing may not be read. David Hockney describes how his father wore a suit decorated with cut-out paper dots. “He taught me not to care what the neighbours think”, Hockney tells Porter, but if the neighbours hadn’t noticed, his father may not have done it, and Hockney’s subsequent experiments with dress could be read as a rehearsal in audience, as well as aesthetic, development.

There is a devastating moment when Porter, by his own admission, assumes that a paint-covered pair of loafers belong to Jackson Pollock. They are Lee Krasner’s; Pollock’s are pristine. Earlier Porter has told us that her career suffered because of his alcoholism and mental illness. In this light, Pollock’s clean shoes seem as troubling as Yves Klein’s tuxedo.

Porter leaves out, probably rightly, some kinds of specific performance wear and wearable sculpture, such as Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolé Capes, or Franz Erhard Walther’s fabric performance-forcing works. VALIE EXPORT’s chaps and Lynda Benglis’s dildo don’t get a mention either. But these categories are different: they are costumes or actual artworks in themselves. This project covers everyday dress practice for artists, from workwear to awards ceremonies; all part of the job, but not the job itself.

Vaari Claffey is a curator based in Dublin.

Note:

1Donald Winnicott, ‘Transitional objects and transitional phenomena; a study of the first not-me possession’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1953, 34 (2), pp 89-97.

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Catherine Marshall and Mary Ryder (Eds.)
Irish Academic Press, 224 pp

The untimely death of a brilliant artist feels like a shock to the system. A lifetime of work is swiftly brought into sharp focus, akin to a camera lens settling on a once moving, now static subject. Through this process of crystallisation, we observe their entire career as a consecrated whole, as if seeing it undisturbed for the very first time. Out of this retrospective survey emerges a legacy, fully formed and luminous.

Published in June 2019, the catalogue raisonné of the work of Irish artist, Janet Mullarney, provided some archival comfort in this regard, following the sad news of the artist’s passing on 3 April 2020. Often assembled posthumously at great effort and expense, the catalogue raisonné is a comprehensive and annotated record of an artist’s practice, aimed at providing a compendium of all known works for future scholars. However, rather than an independent academic study, this meticulously composed monograph – which catalogues Janet’s work from childhood to 2019 – feels more like an intimate collaboration, with the artist’s words resonating throughout, alongside those of her respected colleagues and closest friends. In this way, the book achieves a rare blend of archival rigour, critical contextualisation and personal reflection on the artist’s life and work.

The editorial preamble refers to the fact that Janet lived between Ireland and Italy for over 50 years, likening this “geographic bifurcation” to a kind of Joycean position of exile, from which the homeland could be observed “with the clarity of distance”. Such marginality, the editors suggest, also strongly permeated her work across different art forms, evident in her pursuit of “the figurative, when the world craved abstraction”; in her competency as a carver, “when those skills were decried by the avant-garde”; and in her lifelong creation of artworks that were “architectural and object-based” at a time when “sculpture seemed to be moving towards video and photography”. The editors assert that Janet’s extensive travels taught her about “art and life in equal measure”, with her work ultimately being driven by a “search for psychic freedom and balance.”

A near comprehensive archive of over 400 works is catalogued in this book, alongside studio documentation and installation shots from pivotal exhibitions in Irish and international venues, including The Model in Sligo, The Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin and Casa Masaccio in Tuscany, Italy. Janet’s solo show, ‘The Perfect Family’ at The Model in 1998, was instrumental for me as an art student; I remember it vividly and with great affection. Perhaps most immediately jolting was her use of saturated colour – those bright vermilion, azure and saffron pigments so intoxicatingly at odds with the muted Irish colour palettes of the era. Unconfined to plinths or walls, her sculptures seemed to wildly occupy every corner of the gallery, dangling like acrobats from ceilings, or nestling in mattresses upon the floor. The seemingly anachronistic art historical practices that we had been studying in books – such as sculptural assemblage, bricolage and Arte Povera of the 1960s – were emboldened and brought to life for us in that dazzling show. The theatrical staging of hand-crafted figures with found objects and repurposed furniture – such as pockmarked wooden benches, well-worn mattresses and rusting metal bedframes, with institutional implications – served to emphasise human vulnerabilities. For me, the show conjured paradoxes of the soul; it felt simultaneously fanciful and serious, ancient and modern, demonic and saintly, unique but strangely universal. Her talk as visiting lecturer in Sligo IT that same year proved equally stimulating and generous. In her presence, the bohemian life of an artist seemed so effortlessly exotic.

Without doubt, the defining feature of Janet’s work is the cast of renegade figurines that she so tenderly coaxed into form. Harlequins, acrobats, dancers and winged creatures can be encountered pirouetting, leaping and soaring through space. Static moments are imbued in the many figures found sweetly sleeping in custom-made beds, or engaged in some form of devotional practice, such as meditation or prayer. Many figurines have brightly painted hands, worn like coloured gloves; others wear elaborate headpieces, as if signalling some kind of existential burden. A number of early works echo a modernist tradition, with refined forms and polished veneers; however, Janet’s sculptures more commonly had a deliberately crude finish, as if channelling the prehistoric artefacts carved by our ancestors in stone, wood and bone. A timeless desire to reach into the ancient past is underscored in the small wooden figurine, Untitled (Me in 3000BC) (1983).

As pointed out by Declan McGonagle in his catalogue essay, through Janet’s work, we can view humans as part of an inclusive longer story, and it is this “reservoir of meaning” that she drew on to make work. We find a reliquary of cultural references – from Hindu and Celtic deities, Christian iconology and African tribal art, to medieval mythology, Mexican folk art and the carnivalesque – often channelled through the symbolic creation of animal forms, most prominently, dogs, birds, donkeys and bulls. These creatures helped the artist to cultivate a rich and unique vocabulary, in which interior discoveries, transformations and emotions conversed with societal behaviours and codes. McGonagle also comments on the “space between” inhabited by these creatures, generating tension between “the tamed and untamed”, the domestic and the wild, the pious and the profane – between ‘dog’ and ‘wolf’. As described in another text by friend and fellow artist, Alice Maher, Janet assembled a “human/animal/bestiary/tribe that is truly hers and hers alone”.

A master sculptor with seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of materiality, craft and form, Janet was also an exquisite painter and drawer, as demonstrated in the vast array of 2D works vibrantly reproduced in this book. A particularly striking series of painted works on paper from 1996 – including In a Corner, Cigarette Abstinence and It was Transparent Too – call to mind the erotic expressionism of contemporaneous female artists like Marlene Dumas.

The opening and closing lines of the book are rightfully reserved for Janet. Her artist’s note is among the most meaningful I’ve encountered on the cultivation of simplicity in art and in life. She describes travel as giving her a “curious insight into different ways of doing things; of mending the un-mendable, of intuitive thinking, cutting corners with acute intelligence, of getting by with admirable inventiveness, of superb craftmanship and ancient tradition and celebration.” There are few things more magical than hearing an artist discuss what their materials mean to them. For the following statement alone, this book is a gift to young artists across the world:

“I love sculpture. I love the air it needs around it, the space it takes up, the inherent sensuality. I love the dreaming up of where and how it will breathe that air, the theatrics of installing. I love wood for its human warmth and the figure for its closeness to me. I also love wax for its sadness, paper and cardboard for what they are, clay for its malleability and fragility, sponge for its ridiculousness and papier-mâché for its poverty. Colour, drawing, paint, textures, masks – animal and not, painted and otherwise, help me find an answer in the search for my own truth, anonymity and the universal.”

It is difficult to imagine a history of Irish sculpture without Janet Mullarney’s unique and rebellious contribution. Indeed, when commissioning articles for VAN’s sculpture-themed 100th issue (March/April 2020), a feature on Janet’s work was one of my main priorities. The published conversation between Janet and Belfast-based artist, John Rainey, is an absolute delight, rendered all the more poignant as we learned of her death a few weeks later.¹ In this interview, she referred to Degas’ Little Dancer (1880-1) as “extraordinary, like something that had been born thousands of years ago and would go on forever.” Clearly, Janet recognised the importance of this catalogue raisonné in helping to consolidate and celebrate her important legacy long into the future. Such foresight and retrospection reverberate in her closing remarks on the last page, in which she tenderly asserts: “this publication has confirmed the sense of my life and I am proud of it.”

Joanne Laws is Features Editor of The Visual Artists’ News Sheet.

Janet Mullarney by Catherine Marshall & Mary Ryder (Eds.) is available from Irish Academic Press.
irishacademicpress.ie

Notes
¹ ‘Staging Space: A Conversation Between John Rainey and Janet Mullarney’.

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