Flicking through his homemade dictionary of flabby, joyless, tepid, banal, pompous, uninformed, pappy, colourless, smugly generalising clichés and thinking about which painting to ruin next, Jonathan Jones, (somehow still) the Guardian’s chief art critic and blogger, looked out of his window a couple days ago and thought to himself, good heavens, it’s snowing, I’d better bash out a few hundred words about Hendrick Avercamp like somebody does every time it snows, because I’ve never had an original thought and I probably never will and this will pass the time.
His line: Can Dutch people in the 17th century really have enjoyed winter as much as they appear to in the paintings of Hendrick Avercamp?...Much as we celebrate this week's cold conditions in Britain as picturesque and fun, this is obviously only one side of the story. What can ice and snow really have been like in Europe 400 years ago? There was no heating except fires; no cars to keep travellers warm; no modern winterwear. So why do the skaters and fairgoers in Avercamp’s paintings seem so happy?
Good God, the man’s right! There weren’t any cars in Europe 400 years ago, were there? Truly JJ, it must be ‘tempting to give art criticism a winter twist and take a look at the vividly white worlds created by great painters in the past’ when you can draw upon insights like that at will. ‘ART CRITICISM’! HE CALLS THIS FUCKING SHIT ‘ART CRITICISM’, AND HE’S NOT BEING IRONIC – HE DOESN’T EVEN HAVE THE FUCKING DECENCY TO BE SELF-DEPRECATING. I BET HE DESCRIBES HIMSELF AS AN ‘INTELLECTUAL’. I FUCKING BET.
Oh dear, this always happens when I start talking about JJ, earlier this week he wrote a THREE PARAGRAPH article about why 20th century German art is greater than 20th century British art – drawing upon, for reasons never made entirely clear, the example of the Renaissance, not that Germany as we understand it now existed during the Renaissance but such things aren't a concern for an ART CRITIC with a point to prove – and I punched my mother in the face out of sheer frustration. I’ll try to reign myself in a bit this time.
Oh dear, this always happens when I start talking about JJ, earlier this week he wrote a THREE PARAGRAPH article about why 20th century German art is greater than 20th century British art – drawing upon, for reasons never made entirely clear, the example of the Renaissance, not that Germany as we understand it now existed during the Renaissance but such things aren't a concern for an ART CRITIC with a point to prove – and I punched my mother in the face out of sheer frustration. I’ll try to reign myself in a bit this time.
Okay, he concludes this little triumph of a piece with a reflection on the fact that Avercamp ‘is at one and the same time a liar and a truth-teller,’ inadvertently evoking the horrendous Nicholas from Posy Simmonds’ Tamara Drewe – and his thrillingly meaningless assertion that ‘I think the real secret of being a writer is learning to be a convincing liar. I mean, that’s what we are: storytellers...liars’ – twat resembling twat with sickening predictability. Before Jones drops that intellectual bombshell, though, we get the best bit of all. And by best I obviously mean the worst:
A new book published by Yale University Press argues that Hendrick Avercamp in fact created the ice fair genre as a type of entertaining picture.
Brilliant. I haven’t read this new book, but I have this wonderful image in my head of its author, P. Roelofs, stumbling across this summary of his book as 192 pages of stating the UBELIEVABLY OBVIOUS and furiously stabbing JJ in the neck with a rusty knife whilst screaming, I HAD A COMPLEX FUCKING THESIS YOU APALLING PRICK, I DIDN’T SPEND 192 PAGES POINTING OUT THAT PAINTINGS OF PEOPLE ICE-SKATING AND WEEING AND FEELING EACH OTHER UP IN THE SNOW WERE ‘A TYPE OF ENTERTAINING PICTURE’ BECAUSE I REALISED, UNLIKE YOU, THAT ANYBODY WITH EVEN HALF AN EYE CAN APPRECIATE THAT WITHOUT BEING TOLD. STOP TRYING TO MAKE OUT THAT ALL THE OTHER ART CRITICS ARE AS PATHETICALLY MEDIOCRE IN THEIR THOUGHT PROCESSES AS YOU ARE.
To be honest, looking at JJ, I reckon the burgers might do the job before Roelofs gets to him, but good luck to you and your rusty knife anyway sir.
So yes, Avercamp’s paintings, entertaining, yes, well done JJ. Not that that’s the only aesthetic function of the snow in his work – I daresay there’s something to be written about human/nature, black/white contrast; something else about the flattening effect of snow upon social hierarchy and the creation of a vast expanse of common land; something else about the ethereal relationship between sky and ground; certainly something to be written from an eco-critical perspective, considering the fact the so-called ‘Stomme van Kampen’ (mute of Kampen) lived through a mini ice-age and created work that might be read as a whim of the natural world reducing the structures of human civilisation to something rather like farce. Á la Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but funnier. Or the Gatwick airport snow-clearing team this week, but less funny.
There’s something to be written about snow generally, because I’m obsessed with cultural responses to it, and my responses to them, and my subsequent responses to snow through a lens of those cultural responses – be they songs like Jens Lekman’s Cold Swedish Winter or Fleet Foxes’ White Winter Hymnal, poems like Gilbert Sorentino’s Shapes of Winter, or the fact that even though the snow is associated with the evil of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and it’s the thaw that heralds the return of, y’know, good, I still find that thaw depressing and wish that Narnia was still full of snowy pine trees and so on...
I digress. Avercamp’s paintings are entertaining because of several things, but mainly because of one thing. People fall over in them. And people falling over, forwards, backwards, sideways, on ice, it’s funny, it just is. As news programmes have asserted all this week by showing footage of people falling over, ostensibly to ‘prove’ how icy it’s been but mainly because it’s fun to chuckle at people falling over. There was an amazing clip on the Oxfordshire local news the other night, showing a big flurry of snow falling off a roof in some village and taking out a little old lady posting a letter. She was fine and hence it was funny. Hilariously exploitative viewing though, I can’t believe they get away with it.
Anyway, here’s Winter Landscape with Skaters, painted in 1608. It features the best Avercamp take-out of all, can you spot it?
I’ll zoom in:
Look! He’s lost his hat! Hohohohohohohohohohohoho!
There is, believe it or not, a serious message here. For there is more value, I reckon, in a curseword-heavy rant pointing out an excellent early 17th century painted fall-down, than there is in a hundred pretentious, quasi-polemical, dangerously generalised Jonathan Jones articles summarising entire movements, modes or, God forbid, nation states in twenty to twenty-five words. Here, at least, is a specific fragment of knowledge to hold onto and retain – and a funny one at that – rather than a big globule of waffle that cakes one’s hands, therefore preventing one from being able to grip onto anything. Anything at all. Ever.
Really, the world of criticism would be a better place without Jonathan Jones – I'm convinced he does more damage than he repairs, and he needs to realise that. So if you happen to see him, walking across an icy lake over the next couple days, here's my advice: jog over. Yell something along the lines of, THINK FAST JJ, THIS ONE’S FOR HENDRICK AVERCAMP! Give him a big ol' push. Make sure his hat falls off. Don't help him up. Rather, like Avercamp's blue-pantalooned observer, point and laugh.
That, friends, is ART CRITICISM.
Sam Kinchin-Smith
Music Editor
