FROUTE: a psychogeographic art project

FROUTE is an artist-led psychogeography project that I instigated in order to explore the relationship between arbitrary objects and geographic spaces. 

The project took place at SIX project space and the surrounding area, over a six day period, from the 19th – 24th July. The starting point for the project was the mundane subject matter of ‘fruit’ and the desire to explore the relationship between objects, drawing and creative engagement with local geographic spaces. 

At first glance there appears to be little or no relationship between fruit and geography, however the notion of gathering ‘fruit’ becomes an invitation to play. Indeed, this desire to find objects to play with links back to childhood. Children do not use objects purely as commoditised anchors for identity but instead imbue them of a totemic significance; fetishizing them and inviting them into their psycho-spatial worlds.

David Crouch (1998) references a project by the conceptual artist Stephen Willats (1982), to illustrate the potency of objects as symbols of belonging in space. Willats interviewed children from a northwest London tower block who used a piece of wasteland to play on and what he discovered about their activities informs our understanding of the way children use objects to help them dwell in spaces:

They take old prams, a stool, clothes, fragments of identity from ‘home’ that can be used to imprint identity in a place they feel is their own; making their own memories. They leave these artefacts at the site, to return to later, to build and inform their practice and meaning (Crouch, 1998: 168).

This notion of objects as the linchpins of ‘dwelling’ then becomes the starting point of a project which uses play, involving objects as a means of occupying the urban spaces of Boscombe to help foster ‘sense of ownership’. Each artist began the project by entering the project space and picking out a coloured smiley face at random from the ‘colourbox’. The colour chosen then influenced the nature of ‘fruit’ sought in and around the Boscombe area. Artists were free to interpret the concept as literally or as freely as they liked and used the ideas of journeying to gather ‘fruit’ as a means of accumulating objects and engaging with and documenting their interactions with spaces. The project culminated in the artists interacting with each other’s contributions to produce an evolving installation. 

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. 

 

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.