At The Edges

Shaun Morris' Exhibition 'Stolen Car' is about to open in Rugby and I was interested to read his fellow Birmingham artist Andrew Smith's essay on the work in a recent post on Shaun's own blog [1.]. Those motorway paintings are completely rooted in the kind of intermediate zones, delineated by major road systems, where a large city frays into the countryside.  Having grown up on the fringes of Birmingham, Shaun is still clearly drawn to the particular qualities of such places and the associations they provoke.

Shaun Morris, 'Stolen Car', Charcoal On Paper, 2012

Shaun Morris, 'Stolen Car' Painting, Oil On Canvas, 2012

Coincidentally, it was also Andy Smith who recommended Robert Smithson's writings to me and I'm taking the liberty here of quoting verbatim an extract from his 'Spectral Suburbs', - itself just part of a longer, wider-ranging essay entitled 'A Museum Of Language In The Vicinity Of Art, from 1968 [2.].  It's a great piece of writing that connects with the whole subject of suburbia and 'non sites' that have fascinated numerous creative artists in recent decades.  It also gives specific mention to Ed Ruscha, - an artist whose work interests me greatly.

Ed Ruscha, 'Every Building On The Sunset Strip', Artist's Photo Book, 1966

"Suburbia encompasses the large cities and dislocates the 'country'.  Suburbia literally means 'the city below'; it is a circular gulf between city and country - a place where buildings seem to sink away from one's vision - buildings fall back into sprawling babels or limbos.  Every site glides away towards absence.  An immense negative entity of formlessness displaces the centre which is the city and swamps the country.  From the worn down mountains of North New Jersey to postcard skylines of Manhattan, the prodigious variety of 'housing projects' radiate into a vaporised world of cubes.  The landscape is effaced into sidereal expanses and contractions.  Los Angeles is all suburb, a pointless phenomenon which seems uninhabitable, and a place swarming with dematerialised distances.  A pale copy of a bad movie.  Edward Ruscha records this pointlessness in his 'Every Building on the Sunset Strip'.  All the buildings expire along a horizon broken at intervals by vacant lots, luminous avenues, and modernist perspectives.  The outdoor immateriality of such photographs contrasts with the pale but lurid indoors of Andy Warhol's movies.  Dan Graham gains this 'non-presence' and serial sense of distance in his suburban photos of forbidding sites.  Exterior space gives way to the total vacuity of time.  Time as a concrete aspect of mind mixed with things is attenuated into ever greater distances, that leave one fixed in a certain spot.  Reality dissolves into leaden and incessant lattices of solid diminution.  An effacement of the country and city abolishes space, but establishes enormous mental distances.  What the artist seeks is coherence and order - not 'truth', correct statements or proofs.  He seeks the fiction that reality will sooner or later imitate." [3.]

Ed Ruscha, 'Sunset Strip', Scratched Photograph, 1966/1995

Los Angeles, California, (Photographer Unknown)

Los Angeles, California, (Photographer Unknown)

Ruscha's L.A. is, of course, the archetype of the de-centred, freeway-dominated modern city and in 1968, America was the best place to experience the phenomenon in its most highly developed form.  I witnessed it myself, in 2000 whilst driving across the interminable outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona, - a city that resembles nothing so much as the desert it emerges from.

Phoenix, Arizona, (Photographer Unknown)

Dan Graham, 'Homes For America', Offset Litho Print, 1966

Dan Graham, 'Homes For America', Photographic Print, 1966

Notable home grown poets of similar terrain would include writers J.G. Ballard, Iain Sinclair, Michael Simmons Roberts and Paul Farley; film maker Patrick Keiller and painter George Shaw, but the entire list of those who have engaged with it would be much longer,  (Ballard and Sinclair have both made a feature of motorways in their writing, it should also be remembered). Indeed, are not most people born since the war actually denizens and potential chroniclers of the suburbs?

We're all familiar with the extensive suburbs surrounding big cities but these days, most towns and even villages have their own spreading skirts of estate housing and light industry, or are simply conjoined or absorbed into larger conurbations. British suburbia may be less diffuse, and often more parochial in nature than the world that Smithson and fellow artist Dan Graham revealed but increasingly, a similar kind of romantic alienation can be felt here too, - in contemporary industrial estates, business parks, and green-field developments of all sorts.  

George Shaw, 'The New Houses', Enamel On Panel, 2011

Film Still From 'London', Dir. Patrick Keiller, 1994

J.G. Ballard Outside His Shepperton Home

Smithson's philosophical coda has had me meditating on the core function and motives of artists for several days.  The notable subjectivity of his response to suburbia as a phenomenon, underlines his comment that what an artist really seeks is...

''...the fiction that life will sooner or later imitate' [4.].

  

Shaun Morris' exhibition of paintings, 'Stolen Car' can be seen at Floor One Gallery, Rugby Art Gallery & Museum between Friday 9 February and Saturday 22 February, 2013.

[1.]:  Andrew Smith, 'Darkness On The Edge Of Town: The Paintings Of Shaun Morris', 2013

[2.], [3.], [4.]:  Robert Smithson, 'Spectral Suburbs', (Part of 'A Museum Of Language In The Vicinity Of Art', 1968), In Jack Flam (Ed.), 'Robert Smithson: Collected Writings', Berkeley, University Of California Press, 1996