Flat Surface Painting, Michael Simpson at Spike Island, Bristol - 16 January to 27 March

Bench Painting 67 [Bruno Resurrect] (reworked 2008) 
Oil on Canvas 
245 x 518 cm


Michael Simpson studied painting at the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s. Yet while his peers were embracing the brave new world of Pop Art, Simpson turned to the past in order to recalibrate and reconfigure the transformations of faith, illusion and transcendence in secular society. Rather than simply holding a mirror up to social and cultural structures, Simpson’s paintings dig deeper, in ways that align them with Foucault’s methodological approach. Simpson is an archaeologist of embedded power systems of discipline, regulation and illusion. Indeed, both his fascination with the writings and life of Giordano Bruno, a Renaissance scholar burned at the stake for heresy, and what Simpson terms as “the infamy of religious history”, become ways of disentangling the relationship between representation and institutional exclusion, in an age in which aesthetics are dominant. As well referencing the composition and perspectival techniques of Renaissance painting, the Leper Squint series specifically refer to the viewing holes built into the walls of churches that once allowed the inadmissible to ‘participate’ in sermons without entering the congregation. Here, the Renaissance motif of the architectural frame becomes an allegory for our times. In an age of where ‘choice’ and ‘participation’ are the buzz words through which to engage individuals as legal subjects, the screen and the interface masks the power and property relations of political agency. The frame is key in determining our over-identification with institutions of power. Whether it is the neoliberal pedagogies of Big Brother, Dragons Den and the X-Factor or the binary interface Tinder, the frame invites audience into artwork, whilst at the same time ultimately excluding us from its means of production. Here, illusionary forms become part of a technocratic system for rationalising and reorganising labour value and exchange, as exploitation of ‘bare life’, and for the exclusion and eventual elimination of non-participatory subjects. In other words, the interface becomes the dehumanising means necessary for the cultural and institutional rationalisation of Social Darwinism. 

Squint 18 (2015)

Oil on Canvas

229 x 121 cm

Paradoxically, whilst Simpson is deeply critical of ideological dogma and the brutality of organised religion, his paintings also adopt an ambivalence towards the obfuscating glamour and of pop culture and the illusions of our seemingly liberated times. These works are far from agnostic and have a deeply meditative resolve, which balances hermetic withdrawal with critical reflection on the social, cultural and physical architectures of exclusion. Simpson plays with the complex and paradoxical relationship between belief and illusion, playing off the acetic language of American minimalism against the illusionary tropes of renaissance painting. His paintings do not conform to the ‘liberated’ anti-illusionism of minimalism nor the bank-friendly ambivalence of Abstract Expressionism, which Nelson Rockefeller's once famously described as “free enterprise painting”. Instead, Simpson uses the dialogue between illusion and pure form, as a way of questioning the neutrality our architectures of exclusion; the ambivalence that reduces migrants, the homeless, the elderly, the displaced and the marginalised to ‘bare life’. Equally this makes us reflect on the occupation of public space by corporations, in which sovereignty over non-legal subjects is instated with makeshift architecture, the introduction Public Space Protection Orders and the infamous brutality of anti-homeless spikes and on the spot fining.

Far from Simpson’s paintings adopting the critical and complicit stance of Pop Art, they are, in fact deep ethical reflections on the politics of illusion. Thus, in the flesh, they are far from flat and shiny. The surfaces are often heavily textured as if a comb has being dragged methodically through the paint, perhaps in a gesture towards the minimalist paintings of Zebedee Jones. Up close, the illusionary techniques are thwarted as the brush skims the ridges of these surfaces. Yet, as in the case of the meticulously painted shroud-like cloths that appear in some of his Bench Painting series, seemingly weighing down the coffin-like blocks, the adherence to classical painting is challenged by a lightness of touch, which renders this drapery as the ghostly, untouchable projection of cinema. In this direction, Simpson has increasingly described these works as vanitas paintings. In doing this he presents us with a deeply personal paradox, the relationship between figuration and transcendence (his Catholic bodily conscience) and the ontological value in rehearsing death and mortifying the flesh. Indeed, this reflects the paradoxical nature of Giordano Bruno’s fate. In not renouncing his ideas and in his adherence to his belief in the power of transcendence over the body until the bitter end, Bruno ultimately presented himself to the authorities as ‘bare life’. Conversely, he became Christ-like – a body deemed unworthy of life yet in possession of a spiritual and intellectual core, untouchable by his persecutors.

The austere, coffin-like structures in his Bench Paintings appear to float, perhaps alluding to both the resurrection of Christ and the paradoxical relationship between hermetic ascension and the transcendence of enlightenment thinking. Indeed, Simpson has confessed a disliking of gravity, which becomes a Cartesian battle between the desire for intellectual and bodily transcendence and our earthbound nature. Here, the enlightenment shift masks the corporeal relations between power and freedom, previously reinforced by medieval authoritarianism and now reproduced in the biopolitical sphere of liberal forms of governance. Whether its the need for individuals to reproduce and sustain livelihoods within an ever narrowing performative field or the control and regulation of migration, the relationship between the desire for freedom and the exercise of power ultimately comes back to the human body and its right to thrive or wither away. Simpson’s paintings make us all too aware of the cognitive dissonance between the corporeal awareness and representational illusion. Not only does he draw our attention to the weight and encumbrance of the body but also to the conflict between the flat space of virtual projection and the ‘flesh of the world’. The textural and gestural qualities maintained by the act of painting, recalls Merleau-Ponty, in reminding us of the ‘ubiquity of body’ in an age of screen surfaces. Likewise, the minimist trompe-l'œils, invite the bodily imagination to project itself into virtual space more readily than the transcendent cybernetic passivity of the screen interface. Beyond the Cartesian elaboration of the internet, our Godlike propriety over virtual worlds and the impenetrability of the touch screen, the surface of painting reminds us of our own bodies. Here, as artist and writer Bernice Donzelmann suggests, ‘surface is flesh, of sorts’.

Simpson paintings seem to reflect the ways in which the religious illusions that once maintained the deep structures of power and property, as exercised by church and crown, are transformed from the direct disciplining and punishment of bodies – imprisonment, torture and execution – and the allowance or denial of life, to remote governance and the regulation of bodily freedoms and life choices, in which individuals are allowed to choose from multiple paths to either inclusion and life, on the one hand and exclusion and death on the other. Likewise, the Christian parable of ‘the broad and narrow way’ is transformed into a kind of Social Darwinist ‘Wacky Races’, where the object is to install fake scenery to trick your competitors into thinking they are heading towards their own ‘finish lines’, when they have in fact been fast-tracked towards the abyss.

For me, the sheer brutality of contemporary forms of exclusion is represented in the perspectival devices of Simpson’s un-inhabitably shallow architectural spaces. These are not only the spaces of purgatory and divine judgement but the façades, architraves and doorways in which the homeless, the mentally ill, the young, political outsiders and other disenfranchised loiterers wait to be ‘moved on’. Hey remind us that we live in society in which, despite illusions to the contrary, it is all too apparent that we cannot transcend the body. The coffin like forms in Simpson’s Bench Painting series, are a sober reminder of the biopolitical reality of our agnostic times; that subjective freedoms and life choices are ultimately bound to the human body; its inclusions and exclusions, its capacity to thrive or die.

Review essay for Richard Paul's 3D video work – Sea of Green (The Enunciation of Images)

On the 16th of July 1945, on the Trinity site in a remote area of south-eastern New Mexico, the first atomic bomb was detonated in preparation for potential use against Japan during World War II. The explosion left an impact zone 731m in diameter, with a central crater 3m deep by 340m wide. This crater was shaped like a slightly irregular circular splash, not dissimilar to Harold Edgerton’s “Milk Drop Coronet” photograph, taken almost 10 years previously. The central crater was glazed with molten quartz sand containing olivine and feldspar so, when viewed from the air, it appeared as a lake of green.

Edgerton was a professor of electrical engineering who pioneered a process for photographing objects that moved faster than the naked eye could see using a high speed stroboscopic flash. He was employed by the Atomic Energy Commission during the war, and after developing the Rapatronic camera, which is capable of producing inconceivable exposure times, he went on to document the early atomic bomb tests. His photographs of the Trinity explosion were taken using exposures of around 10,600,000 frames per second, and the camera exploded after producing two-thirds of a mile of 35mm film.

The relationship between Edgerton’s milk splash and the Trinity test site becomes a key element in the conceptual framework for Richard Paul’s new video work “Sea of Green” (2013), onto which he constructs a densely woven associative narrative, incorporating loose themes of Cold War anxiety and extreme material transformation. He does this in production of dualistic montage of images taken from an archive of stereoscopic 3D slideshows from the 1950s.

The work is vivid, richly coloured and has been lent the unavoidably nostalgic glow of the stock of Kodachrome slides from which the images were taken. Many of the images have a slick commercial feel, bringing to mind the cynical impenetrability of Richard Prince’s early work. Yet, when viewing the work something magical happens: the viewer makes associative leaps in making sense of the dualisms and binaries with which they are presented. Information exposited in its raw form and strung together through associative conceptual narrative is imbued with rich allegorical meanings by the viewer; simultaneously placing him / her in the position of both ad-man and consumer. Chocolate is presented as oozing molten matter next to a grid of seductive gleaming gem-like chocolates; a collection of china dolls is seen adjacent to a group of children – painted with make-up and huddled around a box of chocolates; an eye test charts overlays desert resembling a post-apocalyptic landscape – the flat letters define receding 2D planes within the illusionary 3D space. The work is a hermeneutic web of possible meanings and ways to interpret them. The wildly arcing connections between possible visual metaphors appear to be obtusely allegorical, drawing comparisons with the work of Matthew Barney. Paul suggests that this comparison is only relevant in the context of Barney’s notions of potentiality and liminality. Semiotic disparities formed in the relationship between the images and voices embedded within the audio track, further add to this sense of ungendered meaning. We are instructed as to the correct pronunciation of words and phonics, and the mismatch between words and images, for example yolk / yoke, highlights the restrictions of language and the constant slippage between signifier and signified.

Connections are made between eye charts, nuclear testing sites and TV test cards. Materials such as steel are presented as raw matter (in earth), in their world (of production / manufacturing) and in the context of their usefulness (as product). Indeed, all these connections close the Heideggerian loop between ‘earth’ / ‘world’, ‘mere matter’ / ‘formed matter’, ‘equipment / usefulness’. In this sense, Paul is not presenting allegory but instead that which Heidegger (1978) refers to as aletheia or ‘unconcealedness’. Therefore, the work becomes less about conceptually obtuse codification and more about the failed disclosure of reality. Paul refers to this process as “transparency”, suggesting that the images are neither symbolic nor allegorical but are simply indexical. Yet for Jervis (1998), allegory, is unavoidable and everywhere in today’s image saturated world. All images can become allegorical and the photograph is always haunted by that which is missing from it. The “photograph, raises the spectre of the double: allegory is one text doubling another” . Moreover, Sontag (1973) suggests that all photographs harbour this poignancy in stating “the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading towards their own destruction” . Indeed Paul suggests that Edgerton himself was obsessed with this relationship between photography and mortality; and many of his images are attempts to capture the moment of destruction, as a bullets pass through balloons, fruit, playing cards and other inanimate objects.

We cannot help but see pathos in images of steel works presented alongside gleaming advertisements; nuclear test sites next to TV test cards. They evoke a historically specific sense of the failings of modernity and the impending destruction of mankind. Both the holocaust and the atomic bomb were the greatest lessons of the 20th Century, teaching us the dangers of enlightenment thinking in generating moral uncertainty and essentialist ethics to justify totalitarian beliefs and actions; what Bauman (1989) terms ‘the consequences of modernity’. The technological risks of modernity are implicit within many these images, which have something of the same unsettling ambivalence as Warhol’s car crash series, Dirk Skreber’s sculptures or Robert Longo's charcoal drawings of natural and manmade disasters.

Many of the images evoke the golden age of consumerism; the imaginative space occupied by Richard Hamilton in his interiors; a time before the power of advertising had been demystified and undermined by the ultra-cynicism of post-modernity and the new-found agency of ‘consumer power’, respectively. The images are encased within an illusionary frame, which serves to objectify them within the picture plane. This effect makes the work begin to resemble those lenticular place mats of European holiday destinations or the stickers that came free with packs of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, early holograms or - most relevantly - the Viewmaster stereoscopic slide viewer; all of which are familiar and nostalgic objects to anyone brought up in the Cold War era.

Much of Paul’s past work focuses on the process of demystification, which occurs within the direct relationship between consumer and product. Once the middleman of advertising has been removed, new relations are formed in the triangle between the viewer and the juxtaposition of objects within Paul’s images. Working within the parameters of catalogue photography, his photographs present appropriated images and objects as enunciated speech, free from the commoditised confines of their original context, yet these are paradoxically still framed within the formal vernacular of that context; the photographic forms and conventions for presenting ‘required’ products to an active audience.

His photographs give more than a passing nod to Haim Steinbach’s sculptures, yet move the discussion on. These images not only demystify commodity fetishism but also enable us to question the version of reality it presents. In “The Raw And The Cooked”, for example, Paul presents and over ripe banana next to an ugly ceramic resembling raw meat whilst mimicking the surface of the banana. The banana is ‘raw’ and yet is beginning to undergo the process of decomposition while the ceramic is ‘cooked’. This becomes a metaphor for Lévi-Strauss’ assertion that semiotic binaries are formed around culturally specific socio-structural distinctions.

As someone with a background in catalogue photography, Paul seeks to negate the opaqueness of advertising and to present objects striped of allegory by embodying the materiality of the sign. Instead he replaces allegory with mimesis as objects present new layers of referent signification in a Lacanian game of semiotic peekaboo. However, in an age where images no longer represent “any sort of naked reality” but instead “a world already clothed in our systems of representation” , is there any real difference between allegory and mimesis or intertextuality and multi-accentuality? This is perhaps a less than useful paradigm in the context of Paul’s work, which tries to avert poststructuralist readings. Instead, it may be best to turn to view Paul’s work in terms of the viewer or consumer’s desire to generate authenticity.

Hughes (1995) outlines two conflicting discourses that make the issue of people’s ability to generate authenticity in everyday life problematic. On the one hand, we seek authenticity through the production of personal meaning; the appropriation of images, things and places as ‘symbols’ of personal ideology. On the other hand, we generate illusionary authenticity via commercialized consumption practices in which we assimilate things and places as ‘signifiers’ of self-identity. Both discourses characterise our need to produce authentic relations with ‘world’. The former succeeds by resisting the logic of late capitalism, turning empty ‘signifier’ into ‘symbol’; thus foregrounding the ideological aspirations of individuals to produce ‘truer’ versions of themselves. The latter fails, however, in becoming a part of that logic, by forever deferring meaning of the signifier only ever producing what Taylor (1989) terms ‘allegory’. Allegory is undoubtedly something which alludes to depth but in the context of postmodern texts, where it no longer serves the purpose of encrypting substantive messages / meanings, it remains as impenetrable, depthless surface. For Lash (1994) “[a]llegory is cynical, urban, artificial, radically individualist and highlights the materiality rather than the transparency of the signifier” . Yet Hughes argues that by grounding the free-floating signifier with an ideological ‘signified’, it is possible to generate self-oriented ‘existential authenticity’ by transforming ‘signifier’ into ‘symbol’.

It is for this reason that it is wise not to overstate the innate symbolism within “Sea of Green” beyond suggesting that what appears to be allegorical is merely indexical. And, instead we leave the production of substantive meaning or 'symbol' to the viewer. Without the viewer, each signifier, in turn, defers meaning onto another in an endless chain of signification. The meaning of a single image is not defined or understood by its similarity to the next in the chain but in relation to its difference; a process Derrida terms ‘différence’. The role of the viewer is to anchor the chain of signification in order to find his / her own meaning in the work; to complete it, much in the same way as the listener fills in that which is lacking in an MP3. Each image becomes a solitary speech act - pronouncing its liberation from its original context. A stock photograph of someone in Welsh national costume sitting on a green hill surrounded by mountains is indexed to the formal conventions, to both the word and colour green, and to the previous and proceeding slides. Each image is set forth to speak and to find mimetic relationships to the other images, thus undermining their original intention as informational and transparent.

Paul argues that the more romantic elements of the work are incidental to its conceptual grounding:
“I think my interest in the atomic aspect is that of extreme transformation - sand to glass; its aestheticisation through images, its relation to the milk drop coronet and the glass vases; and the period of the 3D images themselves”. However, as much as Paul protests his work’s emancipation, it is hard for him to entirely escape the insidious and nagging anxiety that haunted him as a child growing up in the ’70s and early ’80s. An anxiety undoubtedly fuelled by TV dramas like “The War Game” (1965) and “Threads” (1984), together with a growing belief in the potential for nuclear attack from the USSR, which grew to media frenzy in the early ‘80s with the advent of the Reagan administration in the US. Indeed, Paul suggests that, for him, the beginning of the ’80s was the most formative in seeding an awareness of the atomic bomb and its potential implications, “probably because of Reagan ratcheting up the Cold War. There was a bit of hysteria about the subject – and for good reason, given how close we got in 1982, according to recent TV documentaries”.

Bevis Fenner 2013