Dick's Art Blog

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Government funded art critic John Hurrell has reviewed Tao’s latest show “Space Jam 1996” at Gambia Castle on his blog Eye Contact. He writes that Tao’s “practice in general is conspicuously unremarkable,” that “no meritable quality, in my view, is apparent from just looking at the exhibition” and that “Tao Wells is simply just a terrible artist.” It is clear that Hurrell has an axe to grind, as well as a strange fetish for deleting comments which do not contain, in his words, the “Christian name” of the author (although he recently deleted one of his own comments, as if struck by a sudden frenzy of power). Read Hurrell’s damning review of Tao’s show here. Of particular interest are the comments from Ron Hanson (one of the editors of White Fungus) and David Cauchi.

In the review itself, apart from the almost vicious remarks quoted above, Hurrell says remarkably little about the art in Tao’s Space Jam show (see left, for example). He spends most of his time addressing the small piece of writing I did for the show called “Three Paragraphs on Tao Wells” (which you can read here). Tao has also since done an artwork responding to Hurrell’s criticisms (or lack thereof) by placing one of Hurrell’s artworks alongside one of his own from the show in question (see below). See more images from the show on Artbash (close-ups of the work) and Tao’s blog (photos from opening night).

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Much of Tao Wells’ art (particularly his blackboard works) develops on and complicates concepts initiated by Joseph Beuys’ social sculpture.

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“I would like to declare why I feel that it’s now necessary to establish a new kind of art, able to show the problems of the whole society, of every living being – and how this new discipline – which I call social sculpture – can realize the future of humankind. It could be a guarantee for the evolution of the earth as a planet, establish conditions for other planetarians too, and you can control it with your own thinking… Here my idea is to declare that art is the ‘only’ possibility for evolution, the only possibility to change the situation in the world. But then you have to enlarge the idea of art to include the whole creativity. And if you do that, it follows logically that every living being is an artist – an artist in the sense that [they] can develop [their] own capacity… And therefore, in short, I’m saying, all work that’s done has to have the quality of art. We can see later about developing a proof for this by thinking about these problems.” (Joseph Beuys, 1974)

“I think art is the only political power, the only revolutionary power , the only evolutionary power, the only power to free humankind form all repression. I say not that art has already realized this, on the contrary, and because it has not, it has to be developed as a weapon, at first there are radical levels, then you can speak about special details.” (Joseph Beuys, 1973)

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“I work in the field of art, and you know how during a period of Marxist ideology, fewer people are inclined to believe in the power of the culture as a whole: they believe in the revolutionary potential of economics, class struggle theory… Therefore it’s time to show that art means the power of creativity, and it’s time to define art in a larger way, to include science and religion too.” (Joseph Beuys, 1973)

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“I mean that the idea of art has to be changed. And you have to look for the spring point, where the creative principle begins. Art as it’s now understood is a special kind of creativity; there are others, like philosophy or electricity. But it’s very simple to see that all these activities are necessary for (designating) things in the world. An electrician, a physicist or a doctor has to form the problems he finds in the world, yes? But if you want to provide a fundamental analysis of these problems, you have to develop a special kind of consciousness-science. And then you find that the human body isn’t only located in a physical context, that [it] isn’t only incarnated in the physical world between birth and death… [its] thinking springs from another source… and I am saying that artists working in the West and East and Far East, cannot arrive at a good result unless they look first to the point from where creativity springs. And you see culture related to freedom, because culture implies freedom. There can be no repression from ay point.” (Joseph Beuys, 1973)

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