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.

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