Newspaper Article

Review: Art: HE'S GOTTA HAVE IT: Charles Saatchi's buy 'em cheap, stack 'em high policy has never been more evident than in New Blood. But with so much on show, it's getting harder to see anything to like

Cumming, Laura

2004

Overview

A picture of a bent-over backside. Two of David Falconer's heaps of patently plastic vermin. Four oil paintings, in black and white, and with a really rebarbative glint, of beer cans, old tabloids and socks drying on a radiator. Five of those ballpoint doodles by the young Danish artist TAL R, which I somewhere saw praised for their 'energy' (sure sign of cultural fatigue). Six self-portraits by Japan's (male) understudy to Cindy Sherman. A dozen works by the German painter Jonathan Meese, better left aside for the moment. How it mounts up. Works that come with a handy anecdote - made by a security guard, or a Mexican tattooist called Dr Lakra (surely a spoof, but life's too short to guess the true identity of this Mexican who doctors magazine covers). Works that are weird, trashy, nasty and kitsch. One-gag works. Works that fill a whole room, like the massive cardboard edifice that unites all the locations in The Trial in one superbly crafted, and supremely dull, architectural model. Which is Jonathan Meese in one: raucous, swaggering, attacking the thick paint with his frenzied fin gers, all huff and puff and ridiculous bluster. The young Berliner mocks himself up as mad old Ludwig, or a teutonic knight, or Antonin Artaud with faint hints of SS insignia. You're supposed to find it a little comic, all this egotistical bombast, but it doesn't seem genuinely absurd.

• Publisher: Guardian News & Media Limited
• Subject: Meese, Jonathan / Saatchi, Charles