Collaboration, Conversation and the Intertwining of Material and Immaterial Worlds: a reflection on the Mothership residency

In April this year I began a four week residency as part of Anna Best’s Mothership Residencies project. I used the opportunity open up the notion of conversation to the possibilities of collaboration both with humans and non-humans. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of affects and becoming, and Karen Barad’s explorations of human and non-human agents, I set out to start a conversation about the nature of conversation and collaboration in the art-site relations of the artist’s residency. At the Mothership person-site relations became part of an affective praxis in opposition to alienating and dehumanising effects of neoliberalism – individualism, competitiveness, exchangism, deskilling, social atomisation and so on. Harriet Hawkins (2014) stresses the importance of shared labour – literally collaboration – in transforming individual and collective consciousness. She uses gardening – a key aspect of my residency – as an example of a ‘grounded’ practice that has the power to disrupt and reconfigure the habitual relations of everyday life:

We could suggest that the physical, discursive, and haptic experiences of shared labour… was part of the creation of a rupture in everyday practices from within which new identities and shared consciousness could emerge (Hawkins, 2014: 170).

The unique labour relations of the residency were an initial source of suspicion as I adopted the cynical post-human perspective of trying to analyse the power relations between host and guest and the exact terms of labour exchange. However, in attempting to calculate and quantify these relations, I found that rather than reflecting the neoliberal idea that altruistic acts are are often thinly veiled opportunism and that everyone is ultimately self-serving, the residency provoked a sense that the reciprocal nature of the collaboration had far more humane dimensions. It seemed that the more I tried to quantify the exchange, particularly in relation to labour value, because I was not paying money to be there, the more the things shattered to reveal human truths and a qualitative value way beyond any kind of contractual arrangement. Thus my attempts to provoke a breakdown of assumed neoliberal labour relations were unjustified as the layers fell away to reveal a very human conversation about not only the need for people to live together but also the importance of bringing things together that are usually held apart. Instead of finding an illusionary micro-utopia sustained by privilege, which masked true power and property relations, I found a situation of honesty – a genuine attempt to make new worlds and recuperate old ones. Small-scale organic farming is an uphill struggle where the old binaries of the humans pitted against nature are initially reinforced, however, in responsible and ethical engagement with complex ecosystems, culture / nature binaries are eroded. Pestilence ceases to become a non-human enemy to be wiped out with petrochemicals when ecosystems are in balance. The context for the residency was not only thought-provoking but also provided a space for dialogue between humans and non-humans alike – “a potential space for collaborative thinking”, as one of my friends put it. One of the key things that emerged from the residency on reflection was the notion of ‘maternal space’ – of how, out of necessity, things of difference are brought together. Instead of seeing disruptions as inconveniences that break our ‘trains of thought’, by being open to ‘external’ factors and intrusions we are able to open out to new and emergent ways of being and seeing that foster generative creative processes. My challenge was to move beyond provocation as a means of ‘exploding’ power and property relations, and to embrace collaborative conversation as a means of gently unpicking the complexities of context without ignoring tensions and differences. In the words of Harriet Hawkins (2014), to develop truly collaborative art-site relations we must ‘remain open to the generative complexities of a given site… to be able to recognise the problematics of context, without sacrificing the ability to work productively within the community…’ (Hawkins, 2014: 166).

Hawkins, H. (2014). For Creative Geographies: Geography, Visual Arts and the Making of Worlds. London: Routledge.

You can read my feedback to host artist Anna Best on her Mothership Residencies blog.

A FOOL'S PARADISE:

Remains of Spring Cleansing Ritual (installation views)

Figure of Eight (installation views)

Flesh of the World: Powerstock / Abu Ghraib (installation view and details)

 

Asymmetrical Codependence (installation views / details)

Discarded bath tub found on Anna's land

Perfomance stills from Spring Cleansing Ritual II: #cleanforthequeen

The Tower (Inverted)

Figure of Eight II: site / interface (video still)

Figure of Eight II: site / interface (HD video)

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.