Dali House

Many, many and, yes, many websites and blogs have taken turns harrumphing over the 2004 list of history’s “most influential modern artworks”, but Dali House is joining the list because everyone else gave up in disgust after viewing the first three entries in the Top 10. Here’s the lot, and besides, I don’t see any cause for harrumphing.

Curiously, I’ve been unable to find any mention of a 2005 or 2006 list, so maybe the idea was jettisoned after its originators, the organisers of the always vulnerable Turner Prize, took such a public thrashing in ‘04. They must have decided that they were already begging for a beating with the prize itself, so why add another chip to their shoulders by annually asking 500 art “experts” to name their all-time faves? It would no doubt have been mostly redundant anyway, so the 2004 list stands alone, for now at least, as the “standard”.

Most of the pundits’ shock two years ago derived, of course, from the No 1 choice: Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain”, which next year celebrates its 90th anniversary as the epitome of dada.

Emboldened and cheeky (some would say crazy) enough to try and definitively answer the question “What is art?”, Duchamp went to the loo and had an idea. After two minutes’ work with a screwdriver and a wrench, he submitted a perfectly (well, previously) functional gentlemen’s urinal, signed nonsensically “R Mutt, 1917″, and said “C’est l’arte!” And so it became, as henceforth did anything “found” or “ready-made” that anyone had the gumption to call art.

The BBC, still shocked in 2004, asked Simon Wilson, one of the aforementioned art “experts”, for his opinion on the pissoir’s choice as the most influential work of modern times. It “comes as a bit of a shock”, Wilson replied, shocked.

“But it reflects the dynamic nature of art today and the idea that the creative process that goes into a work of art is the most important thing – the work itself can be made of anything and can take any form.”

The elevation of the pisspot must have warmed the hearts of such contemprary Brit iconoclasts as Tracey Emin, whose own bid for the Turner Prize took the form of an unmade bed.

How the hell, Pablo Picasso wants to know from beyond the grave, did a toilet-lurker like Duchamp squeeze in ahead of him on any list, let alone a biggie like this?

But No 2 isn’t such a bad thing, as losers everywhere insist, and after all,”Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”, one of his pioneering cubist paintings, from 1907, has been cited as The Best so often that even dyed-in-the-wool cubists get a little fed up with it.

And as a bonus for all his hard work and compensation for settling for second spot, Picasso also snagged No 4 on the Top 10 All-Time list, with his scary Spaniard-in-the-works monster “Guernica” (above).

Marilyn Monroe died in August 1962 and within four months was starring in no fewer than 20 silkscreens by Andy Warhol, the repeated image stolen from a publicity still for her freaky ‘53 film “Niagara”. The “Marilyn Diptych” was chosen by the fearsome 500 as the third most influential work in modern art. Much has been made of Warhol “evoking her ubiquitous media presence” by duplicating the image countless times, blah blah blah, but the fading on the right side was a rather poignant nod to mortality.

In fifth place – and this is where other websites drift off to go see what Paris Hilton’s doing – was Henri Matisse’s “The Red Studio”. It’s a terrific bit of post-expressionism, but by way of explaining why it didn’t rank higher on the list, Wilson pointed out that most Artists These Days want to see some social commentary, whereas poor old Matisse “said his art was like an armchair into which one sinks at the end of the day – it’s a sort of pure sensuousness that artists today don’t warm to”.

I don’t care. I’ll be in the armchair if you need an opinion.

But first, No 6: “I Like America and America Likes Me” by Joseph Beuys. I frankly did not know who this guy was and had to go browsing. Found him wrestling with a coyote in 1974.
Beuys (1921-86) was a German, a World War II fighter pilot, a sculptor, a shaman, a showman and a guy who loved to argue. He made art pieces with fat, felt, earth, honey, blood and dead animals, then expanded on them with public discussion and performances that he called “actions”.

He popped out whole from the ’60s genre-bending group Fluxus, yammering away about educational reform, grassroots democracy and the Green Party, and demanding an end to US involvement in Vietnam, which led to his most famous “action”.

“I Like America” involved spending three days in a room with a live coyote in May 1974. He flew into New York, was swathed in felt and taken by ambulance to the gallery, not once directly touching American soil. “I wanted to isolate myself, insulate myself, see nothing of America other than the coyote,” he said.

Beuys hobbled around the gallery on a walking stick and wearing gloves, and each day 50 copies of the Wall Street Journal were brought in, which the coyote promptly pissed on. Beuys continuously repeated gestures and certain series of movements, always watching the animal, while the coyote wavered between caution, aggression and occasional friendliness. When it was all over, Beuys was carted back to the airport, still in his cocoon.
The rationale I’ve read contrasts the Native American view of the coyote as a powerful spirit to the European settlers’ treatment of it as a pest. The natives debased by the newcomers, so Beuys came to heal the lingering trauma.

Not bad. Sixth most influential? Hmm.

At No 7 on our to-do list is Constantin Brancusi’s “Endless Column”, which isn’t endless at all but still fairly impressive at 98 feet, good enough for the World Monuments Fund, which helped the the Romanian government, the World Bank and others finance the beast. Brancusi (1876-1957) was living in Paris in 1934, already famous for his single-feather “Bird in Space” of 1919, when the Women’s League of Gorj asked him to create a memorial to the soldiers who’d died defending his hometown from German invaders in 1916. He suggested a tower, then a committee asked for a stone portal at some public gardens too, so Brancusi reconceived the project in three bits – the Table of Silence, Gate of the Kiss and the Endless Column.

One wonders why the column was singled out for the Most Influential list among the three, but anyway, speaking of beasts, we’re off to see Jackson Pollock.

“It looks like a Picasso painting blown to pieces,” someone has written of Pollock’s “One: No 31″, which despite the title is actually No 8 on the List of Fame.

This was the rugged, hard-drinking, no-nonsense American’s breakthrough piece from 1950, nine feet tall and 17 feet wide, oil and enamel. Pollock liked the way the Surrealists liked accidents, because they had nothing to do with the conscious mind. He left things up to chance, gravity and something he’d read about the Whirling Dervishes. With no single point of focus nor pattern, it’s still shouting “order”. “Some see in paintings like ‘One’ the nervous intensity of the modern city,” one commentator says, “others the primal rhythms of nature.”

No 9 is another one I had to look up: Donald Judd’s “100 untitled works in mill aluminium”. I found it on Google Earth, leering at me from the flat brown canvas that is Marfa, Texas, where Judd actually established a foundation to keep it. It’s that big.

And so are all the other art pieces permanently affixed to the landscape at the Chinata Foundation, including a big old horse by Claes Oldenburg. “100 works” is 100 cubes, each 41x51x72 inches but with different interiors. Pretty impressive.

Rounding out the list is another sculpture, Henry Moore’s “Reclining Figure 1929″. Oh, Henry. Ask any kid from southern Ontario about Henry Moore and he’ll start talking about the massive “Archer” that sits in the square at Toronto City Hall, and he might even have a go at singing Murray Maclauchlan’s “Down by the Henry Moore”. Toronto had some sort of thing going on with the British sculptor but I never figured out what it was, and for now I still dislike these bloated offerings enough that I don’t care to research them further than I already have here. Maybe another time.

“The culmination of his early period,” I’m told. “Moore seems to have successfully combined the two streams of his sculptural training – the ‘primitive’ and the ‘classical’.”
See? I’m bored already.

Something, something, Mayan Rain-God, acknowledgement of the reclining figures of Michelangelo, blah blah, “demonstrates Moore’s incredibly astute sense of volume and monumentality” … “posture of the reclining woman pays homage to the shape of the original stone block”… “intimately reflects Moore’s fascination with the landscape and caves of the natural world through the figure’s mountainous thighs and the deep space carved between them”.

Is that the lunch whistle already? We’re done.