March 20, 2008
Robert Bateman: Not A Pretty Picture
No longer content to simply paint kitschy nature porn, Canadian artist Robert Bateman is tackling performance art. In a two-minute video for environmental group No Tankers, Bateman paints a black wash over Orca Procession to demonstrate the detrimental effect of oil spills.
But Bateman was not defacing the original, he was defacing a reference copy valued at around $1,950. The Star reports: "Bateman afterward rushed into the shower with the print to wash the paint off so as not to compromise the print."
In her notorious attack on the McMichael Gallery's Bateman retrospective last fall, Globe art critic Sarah Milroy wrote that "increasingly, Bateman has a heavy hand when it comes to Meaning of Life metaphors, and his technique seems workmanlike, with paint laid on in dull, uniform strokes whether the subject is rock, fur, water, or cloud." Or environmental disasters, it seems.
Still, you can't criticize the guy for wanting to save the whales.
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Bah, people have attacked Bateman for years, all because he is sucessful. They say his work lacks artistic merit and vision - well, this defacing of his work whether its real of temporary has some vison at least. Good for him.
Yeah, insulting Robert Bateman's artwork was a bit like beating a dead horse. But his work really does, for the most part, lack artistic merit and vision.
The thing I feel bad about is that he seems like a nice guy who cares about nature and likes to paint. But he's also discovered a way to make a lot of money by mass producing bland, palatable nature pictures on plates, mugs, giclee prints, etc, for old people. It's like what Lisa Frank did for tween girls, and what Anne Geddes did for housewives. He's just a commercial artist whose work is written off by people with a personal investment in art. As it should be, I think.
"Yeah, insulting Robert Bateman's artwork was a bit like beating a dead horse..."
Yeah, but a realisticly detailed dead horse
Yeah, Bateman is crap but graffiti is a work of pure genius to Torontoist. ;-)
Svend, I can tell you're as excited as I am that there's only fourteen more hours till the next Vandalist! If Robert Bateman wants to come paint a nature mural in Toronto (or come paint a nature mural and cover it with black paint which he will promptly wash off) we would gladly feature it.
Now Robert Bateman graffiti would be edgy.
(Giant painting of female mallard on the side of a warehouse)
B8TZ WUZ HERE
He paints almost photo-realistically, that's a certified fuckload of talent in itself. So what if he's not putting his personal politics into each stroke, or painting bears mauling Jesus?
Rek: didn't you hear? Irony is the new legitimacy. It's Not Art if you actually mean it.
At least Bateman had the decency to deface his own painting, even if only temporarily. Now if he did it to somebody else`s painting, that would be graffiti. And it would suck.
Whoa! There's a lot of hate in this article and in that Star article. I think it says more about the critics than it does the artist.
In fact, I didn't see a single coherent point in all this "criticism", beyond saying "He's really really bad!! No really!"
I'm sort of ambivalent about Bateman, but his compositions are at least as good as some of the better abstract works. His images are realistic without being photographic, so it's not technically redundant. Conceptually, I think this enviro stuff is intellectually on par with most pure "conceptual" art you'll find.
His biggest fault seems to be that he's successful and that lots of people like his work. Any artist should aspire to that.
If Robert Bateman did do graffiti, it would probably look like this:
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/sallymckay/comment/43452/
It's an amazing mural in Vancouver I used to pass on the bus all the time, documented recently by Sally McKay.
The Star had another article today about this... with no mention that it was a print or that the paint was washed off after:
http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/349383
Both articles were written by the same person.
I find the whole thing kind of strange and in learning that the act was done on a print and washed off immediately makes the whole act have less impact in my mind. You can't just wash away the effect of oil spills. Also, why did this writer write a very similar story two days in a row, the second one omitting the fact that the painting was not a painting, it was a print of the painting, and that Bateman washed it off afterwards.
I respect Bateman for having a lot more talent than I have, but am disappointed in the shallowness of his protest. It certainly should have been an original, and a permanent defacing....
I had one beautiful weekend of sailing with orca off Vancouver Island in 1991, and this article caught me because I'd feel the world diminished without magnificent creatures like this. Come on Robert, take it up a notch....!
Tuds