The Engine

IBRAHIM EL-SALAHI at the Tate Modern  The Tate Modern is beginning to exhaust its cultivated eurocentricism, itself a curious, affable ploy and so has welcomed the work of an African artist who can also be defined as a Modernist and therefore an African waiting to be defined as a European. In previous epochs the work of El-Salahi might have ended up in the Museum of Ethnographic Art, patronised by white european art critics as primitive, curious yet worthless and laughably inept ethnographic artifacts. There is no protracted postscript or apology at the end of the El-Salahi exhibition and certainly none to rival the postscript at the Museum of Ethnographic Art in Dalheim, Berlin which seeks to "contextualise" the entire museum within a revision of the recent past and not an entirely convincing one either. El-Salahi is more captivated by his own mind than by what's happening in the external world to the extent that his technique is very often burnt off and seems to be ...

LS LOWRY AT THE TATE BRITAIN  There is snow in Manchester. It is 1946. Tiny figures, they are human beings, are walking past, a vast indifferent crowd. The crowd is organic, has a palpable life of its own. The city backdrop is immeasurable, like a vast sprawling beast. This is the art of LS Lowry (1887-1976). His dates are almost identical to those of Picasso although that is where the resemblance ends. Lowry is an artist of the north east of England. He lived in Pendlebury and depicted the life of the people of Manchester and Salford. The exhibition implies that Lowry is a Van Gogh figure (the exhibition counterpoints this idea by exhibiting one of Van Gogh's works). He is an untaught or self-taught primitive with gut instincts about what art is rather than formulated concepts. He is a person who just goes out and paints and never attempts to conceptualise his craft.  Lowry was a northerner and most of his work was concerned with the squalor, dirt and decline o...