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.
