Punch and Judy Show (edge of representation) at LUNG, Bournemouth - 01/10/2014

 

Photographs by Joseph Johnston

Punch and Judy Show (edge of representation) is a new time-based installation piece I completed for the Bournemouth Emerging Arts Fringe as part of this years Arts by the Sea Festival. The work, which was shown at LUNG gallery on the 1^st October, explores the conflict between systems of ordering and control, which Henri Lefebvre describes as ‘representations of space’, and visual representations of Bournemouth as ‘representational spaces’. 'Representations of space' are described as the maps, plans and strategies of urban planners and social engineers for controlling the way spaces are used and the people who use them, while ‘representational spaces’ are partly imagined, exist in the realm of the symbolic, and can represent of our hopes, dreams and identities. The work also seeks to embody the paradox of commercialised leisure: that however hard we try to escape the constraints of society and self, and predictability of everyday life, our attempts will always be thwarted by the organising systems and taken-for-granted typifications, which structure that which Zygmunt Bauman terms our 'life-world'; leaving us feeling disappointed and trapped. Moreover, the sense of subjective freedom we attain through everyday escape attempts, encompassing our ability to re-imagine and transform our surroundings, are also under threat from the tendancy to make our visual and discursive representations fall in line with a concensus or that which sociologist Erving Goffman refers to as ‘paramount reality'.

The piece is centred on two automated 35mm slide carousel projectors, set slightly out of synch to suggest a clash or conflict of ideologies. One carousel contains images of systems of ordering and control – diversionary entertainments, maps, signs and information boards, CCTV cameras and penalty warnings – and on the other houses visual representations of Bournemouth as a heterotopia of touristic possibilities – moments of heightened aestheticisation and improvised narratives in the visual vernacular of Continental tourist travel. The first set of images (utilitarian), are taken using Fuji film and have a slightly cold, detached feel, and the second (romantic) are shot in Kodak to give them a nostalgic glow. The de-synchonisation of the carousels leads to a new set of image combinations after each full rotation. This lends the work the element of chance as the sequence works its way through all potential variables of image juxtaposition. This is a direct reference to the carnivaleque strategy of chance as means of eliminating the sense of boredom, pre-determination and fate experienced in everyday life. The use of outmoded analog equipment with its mechanical action, together with these chance juxtapositions, also suggest both the fragility of life and the vulnerability of the meaning in the autobiographical images we store in the image magazines in our minds (our own machines of representation). These meanings are also enriched by the use of screens made from razor shells: the discarded husks of lives once lived. The work is backed by a specially commissioned soundtrack, made in collaboration with Bournemouth hauntological music duo Language Timothy! This uses stereophonic sound design to produce a sense of location: both inducing feelings of disorientation and augmenting the dualistic visual onslaught with a immersive sound-scape to overwhelm the senses. The soundtrack is comprised of field recordings from a local amusement arcade, together with a range of samples, including a 1950s instrumental version of Stranger in Paradise; a title which is perhaps the best metaphor for the tourist paradox. 

 

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.

New artist statement

Representation IV: Mike's holiday snap, Kos 2012

2013, acrylic on canvas, 60x60cm

My work focuses on moments of liminality in tourist travel and touristic spaces, and the relationship between images, memory and experience in our engagement with such spaces. My practice is centred on the appropriation of photographic images from archival sources including social media websites, amateur photography collections, film stocks and my own 'holiday snaps'. These images are then 'reclaimed' through painting and time-based media, in order to explore received meanings and to generate new ones, through the process of re-contextualisation. My images strive for a voyeuristic detachment, which highlights the gap between expectation and reality in the production of the tourist objects and their representations. These images are triggers for memory and imagination, patched together from the totality of that which the viewer has previously seen.

The images in my work are those of a daydreamer. The child who gazes out of the window into the middle distance, is neither inside of the classroom nor outside but somewhere else; a place which is both mediated by the space, and at the same time, produces it. The relationship between subject and object does not exist in conventional time and space but instead is partly imagined and encompasses 'subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history' (Soja, 1996, 57).

My work also represents the unobtainable; the myth. The capacity of memory to produce illusionary versions of the past. Like half-remembered, half-imagined, long hot summers of childhood, these images are like impenetrable, digitised versions of the endlessly looping home movies in our heads. Their ice-cream warmth never satiates our desire to be in the moment. Meaning in my work is everywhere and nowhere, the images are both potent and facile. They are both liminal openings onto psychic space and impenetrable façades that seduce us with their potential for allegory and pathos.

A list of artists whose work has influenced me:

George Shaw, Paul Winstanley, Brendan Neiland, Rosie Snell, Wolfgang Tillmans, Peter Doig, Gerhard Richter, David Hockney, Edward Hopper, Jeff Wall, Martin Parr, Ed Ruscha, The Boyle Family, David Thorpe, Laura Oldfield-Ford, Patrick Keiller, Tacita Dean, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Neil White, Stephen Willatts