Barthes / Burgin at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, 13th February-16th April

Roland Barthes, Dessin n°393, daté du 21 mai 1972.

The final exhibition at the John Hansard Gallery, before moving from Southampton University’s Highfield Campus to its new central location, brings together two distinctly separate yet intimately entwined critical thinkers. Shown for the first time in the UK are a selection of Roland Barthes’ little known drawings brought together with three pieces by Burgin. The influence of Barthes on Burgin’s work both as a writer and artist is well known. Not only are several of Burgin’s essays in direct dialogue with Barthes’ writings but there is also a distinct theoretical influence on Burgin’s practice as an artist. It seems like over-simplification to suggest that Burgin, like Barthes, is first and foremost a writer, as the two aspects of his practice are in obvious dialogue, yet there is also a degree of separation between the two; a kind of translation which takes place in order to allow the work to live beyond theory. Burgin himself acknowledges a certain distance between himself and the algorithmically driven cultural developments of alter-modernity. Whilst he acknowledges his fascination with computer games, for example, he prefers to observe them and to “read about them”, which for him is “the way intellectuals experience life”. This is not a scathing criticism of Burgin, however, for he seems to retain a certain idealism about the generative potential of games engines beyond the “pre-packaged”; beyond fixed rules and terms of engagement. Indeed he is particularly interested in the first-person video game Dear Esther, because there are “no rules”.

Barthes’ works on paper are somewhere between script and painting, which is most obviously influenced by Cy Twombly, whom Barthes wrote about, most notably, in Cy Twombly: Works on Paper and The Wisdom of Art. Barthes’ drawings are rhythmic and ideosynchratic; resembling Japanese calligraphy, hand drawn maps and the repetitive ‘carefree’ motifs of phonebook doodles. They are worlds away from the patriarchal violence and big-business spectacle of abstract expressionism. They also have a joyous exuberance of one delighting in the properties of drawing materials. His marks seem as considered yet unselfconcious as those to be found on pen testing pads in stationary shops. His images, if one can call them that, are anything but representational. His placement of marks suggest a flow of energy and dialogue between them that draws our attention to the paper and undermines traditional figure-ground relations. Yet as his works on headed hotel paper suggest, his fetishism in the action of applying ink to paper and mark marking, in these terms, becomes merely a way of guiding the speed and flow of ink and the pressure of the hand. Therefore if these works are representations, they are traces of body space, movement, muscle memory. Yet perhaps it is better to think of them in the terms of the Situationists, as a détournement of the image-making process. Barthes perverts the desire for representation into a pleasurable act of what de Certeau terms ‘making do’ – a means of losing oneself in a meditative state; a similataneous awakening of material consciouness and a putting subjectivity to sleep.

Burgin’s digital projections combine image and text or ‘intertitles’, inserted between images. These include quotations from Barthes, Milan Kundera and Philip K. Dick. The three of Burgin’s works included in the exhibition – one of which was commissioned especially – use games engines to produce what he term’s ‘moving stills’, which, whilst animated, explore images through subtle shifts that elaborate Renaissance perspectival techniques via impossible viewing points. Burgin suggest that in terms of image-making and in the context of the gallery space, these works are a development of the representational tradition of painting rather than photography or film. Yet there is also a great emphasis on breaking down the constraints of Renaissance illusionism. In presenting the viewer with impossible viewpoints, Burgin provides a post-corporeal vision that mirrors the transcendence of internet technologies. Likewise this disorientating reverie in the unpredictability of the text disunifies and fragments subjectivity and dislocates Text from Work. In other words it liberates the utterence from the speaker, the signifier from the signified, the script from it’s institutionally supported or authorial reading / writing. And what is left, Barthes would describe as signifiance: an open and generative process of textual and inter-textual potentiality. Burgin brings texts together in open and contingent ways, yet prevents their internal or cross pollination. He is the horticulturist that keeps the bees from the flowers or removes their stamen or pistils; neutering meaning and thus the fruition of Work. The Textual pleasure, as Barthes calls it, comes from the oscillation between familiarity and the shock of disorientation at the breakdown in language; the lack of definable fruit. The opening up of desire presents the vertiginous void beneath it. In this direction, Burgin is more of a reader than a maker; a flirter with texts. His practice becomes a pleasurable dance across a multiplicity of texts. He touches the petals of a multitude of flowers, yet collects pollen from none. In a sense, Burgin does not commit to knowing or being. His work is a flirtation with heterotopia: other spaces, other ideas, other possibilities, other beings. It becomes a way of foregrounding his enunciations so that his contingent utterances are not bound to a singular narrator / author. He takes pleasure in actively demonstrating the lack of distinction between reader and writer. He is not making anything; he is lost in textual production; he is lost in Text. This is not simply to say that in his cerebral transcendence he becomes incorporeal, but that in the hybrid composition of authorship, the subjective whole is lost. To quote Barthes’ most famous essay The Death of the Author: ‘Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes’. Yet, paradoxically, Burgin’s position on the loss, erasure and atrophy has a distinctly critical ambivalence. Like the public coffee house overlooking the Bosphorous visualised in his work A Place To Read, the clearing of social spaces in common and subsequent replacement with anonymous bastions of globalisation, demonstrates the deeper problems of valourising the neutrality of a post-ideological atopias. That globalisation remains a historical process in which one form of power is atrophied by another; and we are all authors of that process.

COLOUR: a collective drawing project at SIX Project Space

The COLOUR project (2013) started almost by accident when artist and curator Theresa Bruno was unable to attend a drawing workshop that Sarah Grace Harris was running. As an artist whose work is primarily concerned with found phenomenon, Theresa was particularly fascinated by the focus of the workshop, which was on drawing a collection of green objects using the same or similar coloured media. From then on Harris and Bruno bonded over a mutual love of drawing and more importantly, colour. And, after an initial drawing session, again centred on green objects, both artists noticed similarities between their divergent studio practices and saw the potential for fruitful collaboration.

Harris and Bruno both examine the material world and explore our relationship with the objective world of things to create a new level of perceptual awareness of the subject / object relationship; for the self and for others respectively. 

In this direction, their collaborative exploration of colour questions how we engage with, make sense of and categorise the material world. The project helped elicit a heightened awareness of the subjective nature of colour perception, as they and others began to argue about what hue or saturation might constitute a particular colour. Likewise, the process of categorisation also highlights both the arbitrary nature of signification and the slippage between the signifier and the signified; concepts Bruno explores in "Fruit Bowl Painting" (2010). The piece uses alphabetically appropriated paint colour samples named after fruit to create a clinical colour chart and in doing so also brings to account the cynical way in which consumption co-opts domestic discourse as a means of commoditizing the feminine and in turn pacifying the voice of women within patriarchal society.

 

Colour is something that has been much maligned throughout the male-dominated history of art. It has been derided as surplus to requirements and somewhat frivolous within the disciplines of drawing and sculpture. Indeed, since the Reformation, colour has been seen as degenerative and vulgar; an abortion of the classical ideals of purity of form. Moreover, this Protestant aesthetic is at the root of Modernism. During his early travels, the Swiss architect and design theorist Le Corbusier rejected the colourful world of the Orient for the monochromy of the Acropolis. Upon seeing the Parthenon, he denounces the decoration and chromatic frivolity of the Orient, which he suggests were founded 'in a narcotic haze', and instead champions the rationality, purity and cleanliness of white, arguing that it 'is time to crusade for whitewash and Diogenes' (1998: 315).

The irony, of course, is that classical architecture and the marble sculptures that adorn it, would have originally been painted in vibrant colours. Likewise, Henry VIII went to such great lengths to remove all traces of colour from the churches and cathedrals of this country that we now forget the role colour played in connoting the opulence and power of the church over the peasants of a diocese. And, to this day, colour has little place in the British aesthetic sensibility. On a purely anecdotal level, when we visit the catholic churches of continental Europe, their contents and décor fall into the debased aesthetic category we know as kitsch.

The colours used in Medieval and Renaissance clothing indicating status, and thus the most valuable dyes like reds and purples were the preserve of the aristocracy and of the church. Yet, like a Chinese whisper on the trade winds, the semantics of colour in Western society have shifted from masculine power to feminine disempowerment. For David Batchelor (2000), colour has come to represent the irrational and the dangerous; its image as 'feminine, oriental, cosmetic, infantile, vulgar', proliferated endlessly (2000:71).

Throughout the history of Modernist art, colour has become a cipher for 'otherness': insanity (Van Gogh), naivety (Cézanne), orientalism (Matisse), primitivism (Picasso). However, it is also possible that this 'othering' of colour has been a way of rehabilitating it as something substantive and not merely decorative. As Batchelor suggests, colour simultaneously represents 'a lapse into decadence and a recovery of innocence' (Ibid, 71). Here colour becomes pure experience; that of a newborn child; unmediated by the subjective self that is produced by language.

Further to this, Batchelor highlights the 'inadequacy of words' in representing colour, suggesting that 'we reach outside of language with the help of a gesture. We point, sample and show rather than say'. And in doing so 'we expose the limits of our words' (Ibid, 85). So colour becomes that which will always be other to the unified subject as it can neither be truly named nor owned.

Yet perhaps it is colour’s intangible mysteriousness, which leads to its marginalisation. Julia Kristeva (1982) makes the link between colour and abjection. Likewise, Mikhail Bahktin opposes the unified, self-contained form of classical sculpture with the grotesque body of the Medieval peasant, in all its visceral brutality, baseness, crudity, un-cleanliness and carnality. Colour’s "otherness" gives it a "carnivalseque" power to undermine and challenge the established symbolic order. Indeed, it plays an important role in the Medieval carnival. The "fool king" or "king for a day" was dressed in a harlequin mismatch of colours to symbolise chaos and disorder – of social or symbolic order; of the mind? Further to this, Batchelor, also suggests that bright colours bring to mind court jesters and clowns and 'to be called colourful is to be flattered and insulted at the same time' (Ibid, 67); a level of ambivalence that is a prerequisite of the carnival. 

 

Looking back on the COLOUR project, one of the things that stands out as important is its use of domestic objects. Early on Harris and Bruno made the decision to only use objects that they already had at home. This again reinforces the notion of colour as both decorative and feminine. However, in their choice of objects, Harris and Bruno have highlighted one of the great tensions in art history: that historically, the domestic space has been represented by men. This also exposes a binary between masculine and feminine that is reinforced by consumer discourse. While women nominally have ownership of domestic space, it is men who have ownership of the means of production. Here we see a duping of women into believing that they are producing domestic space, when they are in fact merely consuming it. The man as "bread winner" allows the women freedom to produce the domestic space; an act which becomes nullified by its entwinement with masculine ownership: from the designer to the husband who sanctions this wanton consumerism as a means of satiating and pacifying the woman’s need for agency. What Harris and Bruno do, however, is to rehabilitate ownership of the domestic realm by taking these biographical items from their original context and re-contextualising them as both familiar and alien. In other words, by engaging with these objects in a heightened state of aesthetic awareness, Harris and Bruno both reinforce their magical power as personal fetish objects and imbue them with new mythologies and meanings, which question that which we already know about them.

In this sense, this project re-familiarises us with the meaning of art: that through aesthetic and intellectual enquiry, we are able to see things afresh and to break with habitual ways of seeing and being. Ultimately we can only learn about colour through engaging with it; through focused creative play. Therefore, it is perhaps best to view the work produced so far as the start of an ongoing journey rather than the end of one.