Here’s an attempt to detail
something of the tangled internal monologue over my work mentioned in my last
post. Forgive the length and style
of this one, - the form reflects something of the mental over-activity that has
sometimes halted my creative workflow.
I emphasise the past tense there because the whole point of this is to
demonstrate that ‘I don’t do that any more’. This is an initial splurge but I intend to keep breaking these issues into manageable chunks and keep working in the expectation that various issues will find resolution in the paintings in their own time time.
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| Jaques Villegle & Raymond Hains, 'Ach Alma Manetro, ' Torn Poster Collage, 1949 |
I recently read a book called ‘Art, Word & Image – 2000 Years of Visual/Textual Interraction’ [1.] and for the first time really started to appreciate the linkages between Cubism Dada Surrealism Post War radical movements including Letterism Nouveau Realism and Situationism through to Pop Art and Conceptualism and more recent phenomena like Punk aesthetics and Street Art and my eye was caught by the work of Jacques Villegle and also of Raymond Hains and Mimmo Rotella ...
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| Raymond Hains, 'Sans Titre', Torn Poster Collage, 1998 |
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| Mimmo Rotella, ' With a Smile', Torn Poster Collage, 1962 |
...who
all worked with torn posters which chimed with my own fascination for them and
numerous photos I’ve taken of the subject including my images of tattered hoardings at New Year and the amalgamation of reclaimed posters into my
own recent paintings and also how my house is currently full of coloured
billboard tatters collected on recent local forays and that I hope to use in
collages somehow plus I also thought about how those artists drew on Duchamp’s
Dadaist tradition of the Readymade and employed a rip and paste approach to
text and image fragments to subvert standard meanings or invent new ones
randomly and to regard the city street as a valid arena for expression in its
own right and thus to look back to ideas of the urban flaneur and forward to
the theories of the Situationist International whilst retaining a distinct Pop
flavour and also about a
contemporary Street Artist called Vhills/Alexandre Farto who I became
aware of a while back who’ s also done some striking work with torn posters...
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| Alexandre Farto, Billboard Collage, 2008 |
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| Alexandre Farto, 'Compro Logo Existo', Torn Poster Collage |
...and
suddenly I felt that my own things are quite polite and limited in scope in
comparison being essentially about the street rather of it and quite quickly
I’ve found that my researches have led me to investigate the theories of Guy
Debord and The Situationist International whose ideas about textual
manipulation developed the word-games of Surrealism and the Letterists into the
still-common subversive strategy of Detournement and who also embraced the
notion of the Derive as an aimless but observational urban wandering to propose
a formal urban psychogeography...
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| Guy Debord (With Glasses at Head of Table) & Members of the Situationist International, Gothenburg, 1961 |
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| Situationist Derive Map of Paris |
...where different quarters and zones might be
defined by mood atmosphere or subjective response in reaction to the alienation
and boredom that result from the imperatives of bureaucratic authority and capitalist economics and this made me recognise how these slightly barmy notions
actually reflect something of my own responses to the environment I inhabit and
just how important a sense of place has always been to me both in my work and
my life but how so far I’ve usually regarded it in a largely personal context
like when I haunt specific hometown locations significant to my personal
history whereas Situationism became ever more politicised and arrived at a form
of Post Marxist Geography that inevitably degenerated into the self-defeating
theoretical dead ends and pedantic infighting typical of all self proclaimed
revolutionary movements notwithstanding some really interesting ideas about the
spectacular but ultimately alienated nature of modern societies and the fact it
became a significant contributor to the radical uprisings in Paris in 1968 not
least in the use of provocative if obscure graffiti slogans and a strong sense
of the street as territory reclaimed through staged actions...
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| Paris 1968 |
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| 'Society is an Carnivorous Flower' |
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| 'Beneath The Pavement, The Beach' |
...which all seems
quite apposite just now because its possible to see how these ideas about urban
space permitted access and territorial control all feed into contemporary
phenomena like the anti-capitalist Occupy movement and the 2011 riots and the
multiple ways in which private or government interests seek to annexe public spaces
or deny access in the name of security or direct our movements through
increasingly controlled permitted channels or exert social control through
housing policy or simply price the poor out of neighbourhoods or redevelop well
established areas of cities with questionable effects or create magnificent
palaces of leisure and consumerism or use economic drivers to shape population
distribution or even how the plethora of textual interventions in our streets
cover the whole gamut from the strictly authoritarian and utilitarian through
the commercial to the strategically subversive and just plain criminal...
...and I
realise I’m increasingly attuned to all this as I traverse my own city and
observe the rapid changes its going through and the constant tension between
decay and renewal revealed in its physical surfaces not to mention the
transformations that Britain has undergone in my own lifetime sometimes for the
better but sometimes also in an alienating way and making those connections
really was exhilarating and there’s no denying that distinct elements of all
this have been creeping into my work of late but in ways that again seem a bit
superficial and it raises loads of questions about how I want to order and
prioritise it all in terms of the visual/observational versus the
textual/conceptual and if it's preferable to maintain a detached philosophical
stance or risk straying into political engagement or whether art is most like
itself when it just seeks to witness and reflect the visual world which may
well include multiple clues to all of the above whilst resisting any particular
position on it because I can never get away from my deep engagement with the
visual as primary stimulus.
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| Belgrave Gate, Leicester, 2009 |
...and by the way see paintings as so much more than
just culturally obsolete tradable product and anyway these radical cultural
movements always seem to conclude that no pre-existing art form can be
tolerated just violent gesture or politically correct strategy and everything
else must be subsumed in anarchistic nihilism and perpetual revolution despite
the fact that they all end up in museums and books and academic curricula just
like everything else and this is certainly true of the Parisian student
uprisings of 1968 and the Punk movement both of which are now memorialised and
periodically rehashed...
...whilst street art readily creeps into galleries and fills numerous glossy books and even Situationism itself could simply be seen as the last gasp of the twentieth century Avant Garde and in passing I wonder why I wasn’t more aware of Situationism years ago given that my teenage years coincided with the relatively brief moment of Punk...
...so returning to my work I
oscillate between the feeling that creative practice carried out in our period
of historical crises should attempt to incorporate something of this radical
tradition even though it moved past painting long ago and probably reflects a political sensibility that has more to do with the last century than the current situation and the feeling that by
now we’ve surely outgrown the idea that paintings can only be tradable artefacts of
a spectacular society and I wonder if actually I should permit myself a much
wider remit that with Gerhard Richter's admirable stance of engaged neutrality in mind permits more open-ended responses to the relationship between
text and the urban environment within an overarching psychogeographical
umbrella...
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| Leicester, 2012 |
...and that has made me go back to re-read Merlin Coverly’s excellent survey of the subject [2.] but mostly I agonise over how to encompass some of all this without resorting to trite or obvious clichés or over simplistic signifiers to which I fear I can be too subject or indeed how to find my own voice within it all rather than just travelling already well trodden paths and at this point I can almost hear you shouting JUST SHUT UP YOU’LL NEVER GET ANYWHERE IF YOU DON’T STOP OVER ANALYSING EVERYTHING!
I don’t necessarily expect
you to have read all the way through that but I do feel better for putting it
down. It does seem that one of the
functions of a blog is to externalise things that might otherwise remain as
mental barriers to creativity.
It’s likely I’ll return to these themes in future posts in which case
I’ll attempt to exert more order over my writings as well as my thought processes.
[1.]: John Dixon Hunt, David Lomas & Michael Corris, 'Art, Word & Image - 2000 Years of Visual/Textual Interraction', London, Reaktion Books Ltd., 2010
[2.]: Merlin Coverly, 'Psychogeography', Harpenden UK, Pocket Essentials, 2010
Other Sources:
Guy Debord, 'Why
Lettrism?', Paris, Potlach No.
22, 1955
Guy Debord, 'Introduction
to a Critique of Urban Geography', Brussels,
Les Levres Nues, 1955
Guy Debord, 'The Society
of the Spectacle', 1967, Trans. Ken
Knabb, http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/
Ken Knabb, 'Situationist International Anthology', Berkeley CA., Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006
Marco Livingstone, 'Pop Art - A Continuing History', London, Thames & Hudson, 1990
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