Minimalism was originally a reaction to the individualistic excesses and bank-friendly ambivalence of Abstract Expressionism, which Nelson Rockefeller once described as “free enterprise painting”. If it were to emerge as a new movement in 2016, then it would undoubtedly represent a similar stance towards the flexibility and obedience of today’s instrumentalised artistic labourers. For today’s culture of voluntarism and precarity is kept alive by nothing less than the ghost of modernism. Whether they like it or not, artists are sustained by their egos and the myth that they are making a difference. In reality, they are instrumental in creating a post-welfare culture of voluntarism, sustained by the endless labour of self-making.
I present no alternatives or outsides to the labour power that artist’s frequently misrecognise as capital, except for a futile call for the withdrawal of labour. The clock is an ironic counterpoint to this act, representing the end of clock-time in an age of self-regulated / self-surveilled labour, in which there is no ‘free time’ and the tick of the clock is subsumed into the heartbeat of subjective labour. Performing the act of ‘killing time’ highlights the futility of non-participation. However, in the context of a conference, only a fool would refuse the opportunity to network, because without social networks we are adrift in a sea of signs and possibilities, and unplugged from the cybernetic feedback systems that sustain our labour. The performance serves not only as a reminder that refusal of work is a dangerous and potentially suicidal game but also an act of labour in itself; turning away from the shadows of illusion and language, and towards the shadow within and the potentiality of Jung’s “dark night of the soul”.
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.
"Being in Love is Dangerous" (2015) is a project in which I took the
habitual field of DIY as a starting point, in order to interrogate the
relationship between material and immaterial labour, work and leisure,
in neoliberal society. In isolating material labour from the creative
act of art, I was able to explore the potential of making and embodied
geographic relations to disrupt flows within the habitual discources and
representations of capitalism, and to attempt to produce - through practice, performance and performativity - alternative modes of being and becoming.
The room interior was designed the youngest member of the host family
and all materials were bought from corporate owned DIY stores. I walked
from the host family's house in Southbourne to Castle Point retail park,
Bournemouth, on three consecutive days to collect materials including
three 15kg bags of Homebase 'beach pebbles'. One of the journeys was
documented in the following video, which plays with the idea of slowed-down 'zombie' walking, attentive engagement with non-human objects, and fissures and disruptions in the spatial and temporal flows of late-capitalist geographies. The video includes music by Pink Turns Puke.
The
title for the project is taken from David Salle, who argues that “being in love is
dangerous because you talk yourself into thinking you’ve never had
it so good”. This statement can be taken literally as a warning
towards the mythologies of romantic relationships and their
embeddedness within the power and property structures of
late-capitalism. However, the statement also allows us to consider
the ways in which subjectivity is shaped by capitalism as we engage
in everyday creativities such as DIY as part of the endless work of
self-making and the 'affective labour' of disseminating our efforts
within networks of humans and non-humans. Thus, the home becomes a
shop front for the self and its wider habitus.
Individualism
places identity solely in the hands of the markets, it focuses our
attention on the material and symbolic property required to shape who
we are rather than what we can become. Yet,
the power and property relations of subjectivity are rarely just our
own. For Foucault (1998), 'technologies of the self' work as a
dispositif,
or apparatus,
through which power is exercised upon individual bodies within the
biopolitical structures of late-capitalism.
Fire surround clad in 'beach pebbles' bought from Homebase, near Castle
Point retail park, and brought back on foot, despite house being a few
minutes walk from the sea.
Wood cladding 'trompe-l'œil':I wanted the gifting of labour to be a gifting of skilled labour to oppose the deskilling of the neoliberal workplace and the economic rationalisation of skill and craft as entrepreneurial capital in the creative economy.
Recomposition of the total amount of masking tape used to create divisions between planks on mural.
The
initial aim of this project was to take a phenomenological approach
to the performance of 'work', in order to critique the relationship
between material and immaterial labour in everyday production.
Indeed, as Hardt and Negri (2011) suggest, ‘[w]hen
immaterial production becomes hegemonic, all the elements of the
capitalist process have to be viewed in a new light’
(Hardt and Negri, 2011: 25). In the everyday structures of
neoliberalism, labour and work are the same thing! Immaterial labour
becomes a productive force, that proliferates – when aligned with
the big data revolution – increasingly quantifiable surplus value
through the unpaid work of everyday life. On these terms it becomes
increasingly difficult to mobilise a critique of work. The immaterial
labour of everyday production blurs the boundaries between work and
non-work to such an extend that work is prevalent both in and out of
the workplace. A further aim of this project, therefore, was to make
visible the immaterial work of everyday life and to use performance
as a way of “doing” work, phenomenologically, in order to isolate
its affects. Methodologically, I have attempted to articulate a
series of affective relations by using practice and performativity as
a means of opening up to – and feeling – the process of becoming
in order to critique the conditions of work and leisure in neoliberal
society.
My
'work' became problematic, as neither skilled labour nor the creative act could be rationalised in economic terms or exchanged as capital or labour value.
The 'soft touch' rug.
The
performance took place, in (and on) several stages. The first
stage involved walking to a large “out-of-town”
retail park, over several days, to purchase decorating materials and bringing them back to the host's house. This process reconnected the act of labour with
material and spatial ways of thinking – for example the
difficulties of carrying 'beach pebbles', bought from a large DIY
store, to their destination – the house, which is, unironically, a few minutes walk from the beach. On the second
day I began the work of cladding a fireplace in the pebbles, and on
subsequent days completed this task along with the rest of the
decorating – including the creation of a 'trompe-l'œil'
of wood panelling on one wall. This process highlighted the nature of
skilled work in an age where the de-skilling of the workplace is a
neoliberal trick to perpetuate low wages, precarity and
interchangeability employees. Likewise, the possession of hard skills
and creative talent, leaves individuals vulnerable to the insecurity
of the marketplace. It is not enough to possess a skill or creative
propensity, tradespeople and creative workers must also be
“front-facing” affective labourers – ceaselessly smiling,
eternally grateful and polite self-publicists, tirelessly working
their magic on others to stay ahead in the marketplace.
Absolute Radio: a stupefying mix of masculine melancholy, nostalgia and normative advertising. A false haven from the turbulent seas of 'crisis capitalism'.
The receits: all time-stamped as evidence of my presence 'within' systems of immaterial labour and capitalist exchange.
As
the performative engagement with the work wound-down, and the space
was re-staged as an installation, the performance took to a new
stage, upon which I became a 'tour guide', explaining the project to
visitors and justifying this 'work tourism' to myself and others.
This was perhaps the hardest part of the project – to break away
from performative mediation of the habitual and embodied, and to
justify the gap
between intention and reception, artwork and context, rather than
simply occupying that gap. The work itself allowed for the opening up
of meaning and I did not want to close down the material and
imaginative dialogue. Instead of defending the work as 'art', I used
the opportunity as an exercise in 'commoning' – to talk with
audiences about the work and to enable them to connect ideas
emanating from the 'work', with their personal experiences –
bringing things back to the material and ontological. One visitor,
for example, said that the discussion enabled him to value DIY as a
way of connecting with his home, when he had previously begrudged
the fact that his labour was a consequence of not being able to
afford to pay for professionals to do it for him. He was able to
reflect on the development of skills and creativities based in
materiality and outside of immaterial demands of work. Here work
becomes play, as it is without consequence. Moreover, in engaging
with materials and spaces, the labour of DIY becomes a poetic act,
allowing memory and embodiment to collude, and giving birth to poetic
images in the unlearning of habitual objects. Indeed, Bachelard
(1992) characterises the phenomenological exploration of the poetic
image as being fruitful by virtue of fact that it has ‘no
consequences’. He argues that the poetic image is ‘the property
of a naïve
consciousness; in its expression a youthful language’ (Bachelard,
1992: xix). The
visitor also articulated the way in which his labour was imbued with
a sense of care for his family and for place, and was a way of
becoming at home in the world (Ingold, 1995). In this direction,
phenomenology offers a way to move beyond transcendental critique, to
the immanent and its affects on body and imagination. Here,
practice-based research is used as what Crouch (2010) calls a 'gentle
politics' – a way to explore becoming from within the conditions of
late-capitalism, in the recognition that there is no outside.
References
Bachelard,
G. (1992) [1958]. The
Poetics of Space.
Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Crouch,
D. (2010). Flirting
with Space: Journeys and Creativity.
Farnham: Ashgate.
Foucault,
M. (1998). 'The Birth of Biopolitics'. Ethics:
Subjectivity and Truth (Essential Works Michel Foucault, 1954-1984).
New York: New Press.
Hardt,
M. and Negri, A. (2011). Commonwealth.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ingold,
T. (1995). 'Building,
Dwelling, Living: How Animals and People Make Themselves at Home in
the World'.Shifting
Contexts: Transformations in Anthropological Knowledge,
ed. Marilyn Strathern.
London: Routledge.
