Tuesday 5 August 2014

Thoughts on painting and the mundane




 We Found Place in a Hopeless Love
2013, acrylic on canvas, 51x41cm

The problem with my paintings is that they appear to celebrate the very thing that they are critiquing. There is an attempt within them to explore the ambiguities, ambivalences and paradoxes of tourism and yet they do this from within a picturesque and commercial form. The source material is often in the form of photographs of places of conspicuous consumption. These are then cropped to isolate and emphasise details which explore particular concepts or sensibilities. In this sense they are using an aesthetic form to emphasise ontological perspectives. This is problematic within the institutional framework of fine art because it does not represent a paradigm shift. And while postmodernity appeared to put an end to the avant garde, in reality, it operated within an entirely modernist model. Likewise, subversive art movements like Dada and Situationism were formed in response to the art canon and the avant garde, and thus had no choice but to avoid radical modernist agendas and the political, and retreat to the mundane. Pop Art was perhaps the first truly postmodern art movement as it operated not in response but in sympathy to that which it was critiquing. It revelled in artifice, the banal and the everyday. Pop Art was not subversive in the conventional sense. To subvert something is to acknowledge its existence, to recognise it as a problem. Pop Art saw no problem with the relationship between art and commerce, objects and capital.


Pop Art epitomises the sensibility of camp or that which revels in artifice and illusion. Sontag (1964) makes the point that camp is apolitical and anti-ideological. It is a sensibility that operates outside the system. It is fragile, illusive, mundane, and contingent and vulnerable in its meanings. For a 'sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer a sensibility at all' (Sontag, 1964). In this sense, camp is what Michel de Certeau (1991) terms a 'tactic': a mundane practice by which we can fly under the radar of ideological oppression. Camp is a Foucauldian semiotic 'event' (Badiou, 1988): an emergent form which has the power to subvert the established symbolic order and to generate a transfigured and luminescent 'Being' (Heidegger, 1964).


Returning to my paintings, the thing that stands out is that they are pop, without being camp. They have an mute seriousness, denoting feelings like alienation, detachment, melancholy and loss but they do this in way that is not overt or laid on thick. In fact, the images avoid weight of meaning as much as they do weight of paint. There is little gesture in the rendering of these feelings. They rely entirely on the source image for meaning and yet amplify in a way that is so subtle as to remain unnoticed by the impartial gaze. So if they are not camp or subversive, then what are they? If they are simply commercial art objects, then why is such care taken in maintaining their illusive meaning?


One answer is in the term care. The paintings are material manifestions of ontological practices of dwelling – in place, in images or representaions and in the work. For Heidegger, dwelling in objects is about concern or 'taking care' (Heidegger, 1964). This involves investment in both the images and the process of painting. Moreover, I also strive to embody phenomenological or ‘anti-aesthetic’ approaches to understanding visual representation in my paintings. Developing the notion of the liminal tourist moment (Hom Cary, 2004) I have tried to represent this in the following diagram as an ‘experiential learning cycle’ (Kolb, 1984) in relation to my own art practice:



Another answer, is that there is a deliberate attempt to be commercial in these images and in the domestic scale of my paintings in order to communicate with the intended audience. In other words, they use an aesthetic form in order to open up a dialogue with that audience. The artist-led projects that I have generated as part of my research have intentionally exposed and explored the tension between artist ego and social reality. Within academia and the art market, there fundamental need to perpetuate the myth of modernism and the avant garde. Indeed, it is this process which legitimises the art world. This has perpetuated a particular kind of gaze, which looks for the authentically inauthentic: postmodern forms that fake the fact that they are faking it. These forms appear to have a parodic sensibility not dissimilar to camp but when interrogated always appear as an authentic drive towards difference when they are in fact simply producing allegory or text doubling another. A good example of this Damien Hirst's For the Love of God (2007). Here the notion of authenticity masks the allegorical banality of the object. We understand it through the relationship between the cliché of the skull as a symbol of mortality and diamonds doubling for eternity or the quest for immortality through our relationship with capital, status and power. These are simple metaphors masquerading as fundamental and authentic human meaning. Death in art is like pressing the atomic button, it is going nuclear! Would Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819) have the same impact if the figures were casually fishing over the side? Likewise, would Warhol's car crash series elicit the sense of unease and voyeuristic ambivalence in the viewer if the people in the images were exchanging insurance details?

This argument may appear glib, however the point here is the most difficult art is no longer that of the avant garde but in forms which insinuate themselves upon that which has gone before. The picturesque is particularly problematic because it is the form of commercial representation and amateur art; both of which borrow their visual vernacular from redundant art movements. The visual traditions of landscape painting served either to emphasise ownership, wealth and power or the desire to retrieve some fictive authentic past. Only perhaps do Turner's depictions of the romantic sublime reject these motivations. Indeed, what makes much of Turner's work so powerful is he does this within the institutional framework and vernacular of the form. In other words, he is not rejecting what has gone before but inverting it from within.


To make work that uses the vernacular of the avant guard to comment on the mundane may appear brave but to explore the mundane from within a mundane visual form is, perhaps, more interesting. Lichenstein is not simply making comic books but is reproducing the world with all its mute pathos. He is faking it without faking the fact that he was faking it. Like a Shangri-Las record, he uses mutability and camp to emphasise a different kind of authenticity: a relational authenticity of something which speaks to the everyday audience and is part of the mundane world. They are the shared images of Instagram, the derided “arty” tactics by which we communcate mundane meanings and values, they are not high art forms but instead a situated art practice. This involves the everyday engagement with image making, by which we restore Being through dwelling. My paintings belong to the everyday world, they come from and return to that world. In this sense my paints produce a relational aesthetics (Bourriaud, 2002). Moreover, the context for the work is the context of the work: a world connecting the everyday to tourism. A world that exists in representation with all its ambiguities, ambivalences and paradoxes in tact.