A False Memory of Peter Doig

22Mar08

Peter Doig. Photo from Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin

The word capitalism itself says it all. There is nothing to hide. There is no free lunch. Artworks are commodities. It is what it is. Get used to it… Many artists and intellectuals hate such bourgeois bluntness. That’s why they would never go to the Tate Britain’s current retrospective of the British painter Peter Doig. Doig was once an outsider too, in the orbit of the younger artists of YBA, a little like our Dima Gutov maybe (they happen to be the same age). But now, after an amazing price spiral over the last five years (see here), he is one of the most expensive painters in Europe, and lives on Trinidad.

His work is perfect for the salon, because its rich textures have a calico melancholic folksy North American-Caribbean flair, a decorative alternative to photography, with enough metaphysical shadows and melancholic nuances to give any interior some contemplative weight. It’s bluntly bourgeois art, framed as a return to easel painting, the interiorized, private flipside of Damien Hirst, and it advertises itself as such.

Open the Tate Britain’s extensive documentation of this show here, and you will immediately see what I mean.

What’s the first thing that catches your eye? Other than the artist’s name (associatively placed above a magical rainbow, how charmingly unafraid to engage with Sixties dreamcatcher kitsch), you see a little label: “Supported by the Peter Doig Exhibition Supporters Group.” So there is some serious money behind the show; according to a little joke in Wikipedia, Doig’s collectors “include Finnish retail tycoon Kevin Kokko (who following an attempted robbery in 2005 has implemented a world class security system involving retina scans and biometric and voice tests)[citation needed] and Albanian mining oligarch Jono Dingle Dangles.[citation needed]…” These names are silly fakes. Of course, it’s Saatchi and Gavin Brown. “I don’t believe Doig is capable of making a boring painting,” says the Guardian’s Adrian Searle. “Uff, I’m not going,” says your critical critic.

Luckily, you don’t have to. The show has a big budget, plus the Tate Britain wants you to do some shopping (here). So strap on your own retinal scanner and look at the panoramas, two rooms of maddeningly textured landscapes. Don’t you feel a little dizzy?

Peter Doig says that the thought of someone reaching into their pocket and forking over 5 million pounds for one of these paintings makes him sick, and now, you can feel a little seasick too. Beyond nausea, the problem is that you might suddenly find yourself liking Peter Doig if you take a closer look. He seems like a pretty nice guy. And you will never know. Is this the advertising and its optical drug? Or some faint shimmer of reality under the magical veneer?

Peter Doig. White Canoe. 1990-1, Oil on Canvas. 200.5 x 243cm. Image: Saatchi Gallery,
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/doig_White_Canoe.htm

You will still feel like throwing up, of course, not only because of the prices, but also because of this veneer, this caked-on mass of fake organic ornaments over some fundamental sadness you will always know.

Doig can give you the blues so easily because he is clearly a virtuoso, a bit like Eric Clapton when they let him play the Royal Albert Hall, and a bit like Eric Clapton, he plays like a whiteboy: similarly conservative on the licks and brushspeeds, similarly anti-conceptual, similarly unruly and rugged, and maybe more than just a little traditionalist. In that sense something in the way he paints reminds me of American southern rock with slide guitars and a sophisticated fake hillbilly accent, because it’s always a fake, disconnected from the experience of slavery and the bonfire dance of real rural idiocy, a magical childhood executed in an almost Klimtian orgy of hallucinogenic-cloudy color.

Peter Doig. Canoe-Lake. 1997-8, Oil on Canvas. 200 x 300cm. Image: Saatchi Gallery.

The country-houses, ponds, and roads in his paintings are the acid stuff of the British-American-Caribbean landscape, a landscape that was always a hallucinogen, whether in Turner, the Hudson River School, or for the American painter Marsden Hartley; and its main drug is the false memory of the simple life before capitalism, produced as a nostalgic vignette from the wilds for the homes of the ultrarich. It is something we – your average planetary petit bourgeoisie – will only know through reproductions, which is actually where Doig’s false memories come from in the first place…

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