Completed Paintings: 'space_time_03 [Perdu]' & 'space_time_04 [Memento]'

 

'space_time_03 [Perdu]', Acrylics, Paper Collage, Screen Print Fragments, Paint Pen,
Ball-Point Pen, Ink & French Polish on Panel, 300 mm x 300 mm, 2024

My creative energies mostly turned towards painting as 2023 turned the corner into 2034, and these little panels have been appearing relatively rapidly (by my standards). As a body, they seem to be serving as a kind of test-bed for various motifs, which will (I hope/assume) continue to evolve and mutate as more such pieces appear. Those layered motifs (and texts) themselves represent the numerous theoretical and emotional responses which emerge, along with subsequent (possibly quite arbitrary or capricious) associations, as I repeatedly haunt the same relatively overlooked corner of inner Leicester.

So far, so customary. This is essentially the same modus operandi that I've adopted for many years now. It is clearly what I do. And, as cartography continues to play an active role just now, any amateur sleuth with access to Google maps can easily detect that the territory under examination is still that portion of West Leicester traditionally known as St Augustines/Blackfriars. Bordered by the River Soar to the west, and the inner gyratory road to the east - and with Great Central Street and the ghost of a long decommissioned rail route running through its heart, this little zone is one to which I have been drawn repeatedly for longer than I can remember. Indeed, numerous posts on here can attest to that.

I suppose this might lead one to  suspect that things have all just become a bit stuck - or even that I'm (literally) raking over the same old ground with diminishing returns. And yet, these little panels (along with the slightly larger associated works from last year) actually feel surprisingly fresh to me, just as my own responses to the terrain continue to provoke and delight me. I think this is for two key reasons.

'space_time_04 [Memento]',  Acrylics, Paper Collage, Screen Print Fragments, Ball-Point Pen,
Paint Pen, Ink, Spray Enamel & French Polish on Panel, 300 mm x 300 mm, 2024

Firstly, the neighbourhood itself has undergone such massive transformation and redevelopment over recent years (and continues to do so), that it hardly resembles the same landscape I traversed just five or ten years ago. As a result, the possible narratives and emotional responses it may have one engendered are themselves continually refreshed. The strata of history buried beneath newly-laid tarmac and paving may prevail, but the present (and future) are up for grabs in ways that could not have been predicted when I first began to perambulate there. As the titling of these panels attests, space and time are inextricably entangled, and past/present/future all remain nested within each other in a multi-dimensional exchange.

The very processes of transformation, along with their associated memories (real, imagined and constantly emerging), are the real 'subject' of the work, as much as anything more specifically defined. The lines of the street plan may remain (relatively) stable, but the spaces and flows between them are where the real drama lies.

The second point worth making relates to that idea of continual flux - and in particular to the manner in which my emotional responses and thought-processes may be activated during/following any given journey along well-trodden routes. As work from a decade ago demonstrates, the key process remains relatively unchanged. Back then however, the use of found texts was often enough to elicit a kind of ambiguous frisson, with any further shoe-horned associations being perhaps a little 'route one' (in my mind at least).

Since then, my readings into such relatively pop philosophical ideas as Hauntology and Psychogeography have themselves led to the somewhat more elevated ideas around Situationism or the even more deliciously abstruse writings of Deleuze & Guattari et al. If much of the stuff at the apparent Philosophical 'top-end' remains pretty obscure to me, it has, I believe, started to liberate the nature in which my own thought processes flow around those cartographical delineations. Key to this are the ideas of trajectory and the 'line of flight', as well as the notion of rhizomes as the preferred model for explaining experience and knowledge to ourselves.

If the Situationist notions of the 'drift' and the city as an intellectual/emotional playground essentially validate my own humble activities, then it is perhaps D&G who point to more organic, less 'organised' ways of freeing the mind once immersed within it. Any point at which one's feet/wheels/lens/attention come to rest is essentially just a taking-off point for ideas and associations which may fly-off in a million different directions at any given time. These may themselves entangle with each other in a potentially endless complex of shifting nodes and new combinations. Coincidence, chance, tangentiallity, transverse shifts and apparent arbitrariness are all grist to this mill. Essentially there is only one map, and any pathway (be it neural or geographic) might ultimately connect to another - as we move around it in a perpetual state of becoming. In this context, perhaps one might traverse the entire globe, or simply the same small patch (through time), to much the same effect - providing one remains openly engaged.

Or something like that...

Completed Painting: 'Untitled 1 (Constructed City)'

'Untitled 1 (Constructed City)', Acrylic & Collaged Screen Print on Panel,
30 cm x 30 cm, 2020

Having taken encouragement from the paper-based studies I discussed in my previous post, I'm pleased to have now completed this modest little painting.  As I mentioned, a certain  lack of finished work feels like it's become too much of 'a thing' over recent months, so there's an undeniable satisfaction in having something new to unveil.  It should also be recognised as the first actual stand-alone product from my 'Constructed City' project.  Should I be concerned that the large buildings still being constructed around Leicester are progressing noticeably faster than my own responses to them (even in lock-down conditions)?

Well, enough with the overly-critical self analysis.  The painting does distill some of my thoughts about the construction work (if only visually, at this stage), and I'm still happy enough to live with it, after a few days.  Clearly, it deviates very little from the studies which precede it, and the decision to carry on working at their limited scale was deliberate.  That caution is also reflected in the fairly methodical and painstaking manner of its execution, in which respect it also resembles some of my 'From The New School' paintings.  The tight, grid-based geometry and crisp(-ish) masked edges do seem appropriate to the subject matter, however, and if a highly-controlled, confidence-building approach is to be my way into this body of work - then so be it.

Of course, the small amount of consolidated progress this piece represents, and the possible pointers it contains to work that may follow, should be what really matter.  If the welcome by-product is something that could also hang on a wall - then life is sweet enough for now.  

Mark Bradford, 'Cerberus' At Hauser & Wirth, London

Mark Bradford, 'Gatekeeper' Mixed Media on Canvas, 2019

I found myself  in London again, the other day - with my good friend, Susie, for a bit more strategic gallery-going.  This time, the exhibition in question was Mark Bradford's 'Cerberus', currently on display in Hauser & Wirth's impressive Saville Row spaces [1.].  The visit proved well worth the train ticket, and - as with the Oscar Murillo show I viewed a few weeks back, 'Cerberus' both impressed and inspired.  Indeed, it provided a further reminder (were it needed) that abstract painting, albeit in distinctly hybridised forms, is not only still alive - but positively thriving.

Mark Bradford, 'Cerberus', Mixed Media on Canvas, 2018
(And Details Below)

I've been looking at Bradford's work for a while now - having encountered one of his large, heavily distressed canvases at Tate Modern, a few years ago.  On that occasion, I was instantly drawn to his intensive multi-media approach, involving sanded, carved and tattered layers of collaged material, references to a kind of notional urban landscape - implied maps and found text fragments.  The piece I saw that day, and the others I've seen on various screens since, spoke to certain works I had recently produced myself (not least my 'Maps') -  and have continued to influence others I have produced more recently.  I'm happy to acknowledge such correspondences, but can't claim to be operating with anything even faintly resembling the confidence, conviction monumentality (or, indeed - success) evident in Bradford's work,

Mark Bradford, 'Sapphire Blue', Mixed Media on Canvas, 2018
(And Details Below)

And monumentality is definitely the impression one gains on first entering the larger of two galleries at H&W.   The expansive space is dominated by two huge pictures, and another, truly immense, one.  The largest (which also lends the exhibition its title [2.]) encompasses a vast panorama - emphasising that these works might most usefully be regarded as pieces of terrain.  It's a sensation only magnified during the extended seconds it takes to pace its length at close quarters.  One could really 'get one's steps in' with this work.

And, as with much of Bradford's previous work there's often the suggestion of looking down upon an urban sprawl, as if from some 'eye in the sky', whilst being simultaneously being pressed up against the ragged, textures and urban grit of its ghettoised underbelly.  Predictably enough, I'm drawn to that vivid sense of an artist drawing directly from the streets, for visual stimulus, conceptual/emotional inspiration, and actual raw materials.  And the reality is that Bradford is hardly a painter at all, in the purely technical sense.  Some fluid, coloured media may be involved, but his works mostly coalesce from the accumulation of physical 'stuff' (much of it sourced in the field), and the varying degrees of violence he can bring to bear upon it.  

Mark Bradford, 'A Five Thousand Year Laugh',  Mixed Media on Canvas, 2019

And, it transpires, he knows plenty of what he speaks.  Bradford's studio, and the streets to which he most often returns, are located in South Central Los Angeles - a stereotypically forbidding zone of disenfranchised minorities, social deprivation and infamous race riots.  As a gay black man, raised during the Civil Rights era, but now embedded in such a gritty  environment, it can feel superficially counter-intuitive to discover he has maintained a genuinely refined and cultured demeanour - whilst never shying away from the daunting realities of an environment which must have consumed so many others.  In interviews, he has described the varieties of prejudice he encountered, growing up in the Liemert Park district, but is as quick to point out the strongly protective matriarchal context in which he was raised.  In fact, for much of his early life, Mark worked in his mother's beauty salon - seemingly a nexus of female mutual support - before seizing the opportunity of a formalised art education, previously unavailable to other creatively-inclined family members.

Mark Bradford, 'Cerberus', Hauser & Wirth, London, October 2019

Possibly, he resembles the Colombian, Murillo in this respect.  Both hail from the less entitled side of the social or ethnic tracks - yet now function at a high level within the elitist, top-dollar milieu of international 'High Art'.  Instead of feeling excluded from a field as once abstruse and ring-fenced as abstract painting, they cheerfully hybridise its purist pretensions, and revel in its positives.  Certainly, Bradford has turned it all to his own, far less exclusive, ends - re-energising a mode of expression once deemed a bastion of white privilege or entitled machismo, whilst remaining culturally grounded and politically engaged.  He deploys its visual vocabulary with unabashed verve, and yet consistently immerses political or sociological themes within it.  Further still, he has used his market leverage and increasingly elevated profile to instigate consciously inclusive art projects within his community and beyond. In reality, such a practice is all about confounding lazily entrenched stereotypes, both socially and artistically - and it's a pretty inspirational example.  Even without the admirable element of community outreach - It still might just constitute the equally-weighted, 'have cake - eat-cake, equilibrium between the visual and the thematic/theoretical that I've long been yearning for myself. 

Mark Bradford, 'The Path To The River Belongs To Animals',
Mixed Media on Canvas, 2019

Anyway, to return to specifics, it seems that these new 'Cerberus' paintings also represent something of a departure in Bradford's overall oeuvre.  As has often previously happened, The starting point  was a map of both socio-historical, as well as geographical significance.  In this case, it was made by the authorities, to chart the Watts riots, that brought violence and devastation to the L.A streets, in 1965.  An important element of this was a series of colour-coded dots (referred to, by Bradford as 'hotspots'), plotting looted buildings, burnt-out buildings, and those where fatalities had occurred.  But this time, as the work evolved, he allowed his subsequent additions, incursions and excavations to occur more organically than was previously the case.  Many of those hotspots were removed - surviving as phantom memories of the events they once signified.  The blocks and street grids that still remain (generally as relief delineations in some form of extruded mastic), rise only intermittently through far-more clotted and congested landscapes than ever before.  In places, they suggest mere vestigial foundations (the remnants of some conflict or disaster, perhaps); elsewhere - the still just-visible roofs of inundated neighbourhoods.

Mark Bradford, 'Frostbite', Mixed Media on Canvas, 2019

If the pieces in the neighbouring room are generally smaller in scale - they are no less vivid.  If anything, they feel less topographical, and even more visceral (in the biological sense).  To locate oneself in these territories, is to wade, knee deep, through the very guts of a place.  Any fragments of a community, that might remain, are merely glimpsed through an avalanche of overgrown detritus and shattered building materials.  In a piece like 'Frostbite' one can imagine the city becoming submerged beneath the scummy surface of some freezing lake (I actually read this a something altogether more tropical, but I guess the clue's in the title).  In other instances, it might be that its remains are obscured by a dense tangle of forest vegetation [3.]. These may then be the most apocalyptic examples of Bradford's work, to date.  Certainly, they are the most organic - suggesting ruin on a more cataclysmic scale than ever before, it seems.  But we should remember that Mark Bradford came up thinking about 'beauty', from an early age, and that he appears incapable of making anything without a certain degree of elegance about it.  This work may presage apocalypse - but it's also possessed of a profound and terrible beauty.

Mark Bradford, Stills From: 'Dancing In The Street', Video, (2:50), 2019

Which makes it all the more appropriate to conclude by discussing Mark's accompanying video 'Dancing In The Street'.  Interestingly, what initially appears to be the result of tricksy multi-layered video editing, was actually produced by a far more direct expedient.  Archive footage of Martha and The Vandellas, singing their classic song [4.] was simultaneously projected and re-recorded from the open door of a moving van, as it drove around the streets of South Central (I really like the lower-tech simplicity of that).  There's a definite historical resonance here, for many regarded that song's lyric as a call to arms during the racially-charged unrest of the mid 1960s.  In Mark's footage, Martha's face shimmers across the facades of tawdry buildings which might so easily have been torched or looted in '65 - and which now bear the scars from subsequent decades of social deprivation and predatory economics.  But there's a fragile and ghostly beauty at work there, too.  We shouldn't forget that, for many, 'Dancing In The Street' was mostly just a perfect slice of Pop heaven - even in the most pressured of times.  Cerberus may snarl like a hell-hound - but Martha sings like an angel.

Mark Bradford, 'Cerberus' continues until 21 December, at Hauser & Wirth, 23 Saville Row, London, W1S 2ET.  I suspect that, as art experiences go, it may be pretty hard to top, for quite a while.  




[1.]:  It's only natural to be pretty cynical about the international art market, and the interests of power and wealth it so clearly serves.  It is then, only fair to note that, even in a top-end gaff like this - Joe and Josephine Punter can still wander in off the street, and view such high-quality gear, absolutely free of charge.[2.]:  That quasi-mythological title suggests a potentially infernal region - and some clear sentinel presence also.  If we are to detect some socio-political context here (as we must - where Bradford is concerned), we should query the real function of such a border guard.  Is it to seal the perimeter against alien incursion - or really to contain the Hell within?

[3.]:  There's something distinctly Ballardian about this - I'm inevitably reminded of 'The Drowned World', for all its London-centricity.

[4.]:  Martha and The Vandellas, 'Dancing In The Street' (M. Gaye, W. Stevenson, I. J. Hunter), Gordy, 1964

Janek Schaefer: 'Asleep At The Wheel'

Janek Schaefer, 'Asleep At The Wheel', Windscreen View

It is of course, both a blessing and a curse of the Digital Age, that no single piece of information can any longer remain discrete or hermetically disconnected.  Each new item of interest is linked to a million others, and thus, our attention is quickly overwhelmed and shattered exponentially as we jump from link to link and topic to topic.  Never mind Ebola, information is the virus that will finally consume us all, I suspect.

Janek Schaefer, 'Asleep At The Wheel', IF Milton Keynes International Festival,  2010

Thus it is that, whilst writing a supposedly brief synopsis of Janek Schaefer’s Sound Art piece, ‘Lay-By Lullaby’, (as a tangent to my own current artistic activities) [1.], I found myself also considering his far more ambitious, but clearly related, multi-media installation, ‘Asleep At The Wheel’ [2.].  All of that takes place in the context of several other half-written blog posts, all nested within one another in different ways.  There are just as many others laying around on my hard drive that just never made the cut, (so far).

Exterior View Of Venue For Janek Schaefer, 'Asleep At The Wheel', Milton Keynes, 2010

Yet, I want to consider ‘Asleep At The Wheel’ further  here, for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, because it appears, in itself, to have been a huge, multi-dimensional example of this viral quality of information and knowledge.  It was presented, at first glance, as a kind of immersive Ballardian riff on the thrillingly alienating effects of modern car culture, (as indeed is ‘Lay-By Lullaby’).  The venue, - a disused Sainsbury's supermarket, is a distinctly Ballard-like location and I'm struck by how images of the event capture a similar feel to David Cronenberg's film adaptation of Ballard's novel 'Crash' [4.].  However, further research quickly reveals a far more complex and politically engaged agenda, taking in environmentalism, geo-politics, economics. philosophy, sociology and, pretty much, the prospects for all life on the planet.

Janek Schaefer, 'Asleep At The Wheel', IF Milton Keynes International Festival, 2014

Anyone visiting the installation, (which I didn’t), and spending just a little time absorbing some of the audio information piped into Schaefer’s ten assembled cars or available within the Library and Service Areas, would have left feeling they’d taken on enough mental cargo to last for years.  In fact, considering the existential, ‘big issues’ nature of it all, a lifetime would be nearer the mark.  There's food for thought here on a global scale, and critiques of so much of the way our society and economy are structured.  There are also suggestions about how change might be affected on a personal or local level, including the 10:10 campaign to cut carbon emissions.

Janek Schaefer, 'Asleep At The Wheel', Library Area

Having just downloaded and ploughed through the associated sound files [5.] from Schaeffer’s online archive, I can honestly say I’m feeling pretty overwhelmed myself.  And yet, I would recommend doing the same.  The sound element weaves together numerous sound sources, voices, addresses and radio broadcasts with Schaefer's own musical ambiences into a vast soup of information and ideas.  The general message of the unsustainability of modern industrial/consumer Capitalism, our dependence on rapidly squandered, finite reserves of fossil fuels, and the threat to both the planet’s survival, is hardly new, but becoming ever more urgent as the days go by.  Indeed, it can all seem so intimidating and all encompassing that the individual is left feeling impotent or apathetic.  Nevertheless, Schaefer has to be admired for his ambition and scope, and for presenting so much interrelated stuff in a sensually seductive and thought provoking manner.  It’s also worth noting how well he connects the issues with various insights into human motivations, and that he’s careful to include as many voices of optimism and advocates of constructive change, as he does prophets of doom.

Janek Schaefer, 'Asleep At The Wheel', Glovebox Mixtape.

Janek Schaefer, 'Asleep At The Wheel', Inspirational Rear View Mirror Message

Which leads me to my second point.  There’s no shortage of us, (Schaefer included, it seems), who get off on all the Post Ballard/Dystopian/Failed Modernism/Entropy-fixated stuff.  Let’s face it, there are real thrills to be had from hanging around under road intersections or abandoned factory buildings, cataloguing picturesque decay, trespassing into restricted tracts of infrastructure, or driving nowhere at night.  Such activities provide, to a greater or lesser extent, a frisson of transgression not available through the standard channels of consumption, just as they are themselves gradually accepted as new branches of mainstream culture.  Will all these rehearsals for the Apocalypse seem such fun once the sky actually starts to fall though?  Similarly, a fascination with the ways a life lived increasingly behind the wheel effects our perceptions of the world as an aesthetic exercise, [3.], can stand in for any deeper consideration of the real implications of all this dependence on the internal combustion engine and a petro-chemical economy.

Janek Schaefer, 'Asleep At The Wheel', Library Area.

Not that any of this signals any real change in my own agenda.  Indeed, a significant part of me still holds to the view that an artist’s real role is to respond to the world as they find it, as much as it is to seek to affect change.  Indeed, it’s all too easy to get tied up in an internal debate over whether one’s artistic concerns are a sub-set of bigger, global issues, or vice-versa.  In reality, it may be that for many of us, artistic practice is a manageable way of exerting some rationalising control over life in the face of all the stuff that just seems to big to influence.  I’d like to believe the two things aren’t mutually exclusive, though, and that one might be the thin end of the other.

Janek Schaefer, 'Asleep At The Wheel', Service Area

Mostly, I’m just glad that there are artists around like Janek Schaefer, with motives more noble or generous than my own, who are trying to prove it’s possible to produce thrilling, aesthetically resonant work, whilst still remaining seriously engaged.

Janek Schaefer

[1.]:  Janek Schaefer, ‘Lay-By Lullaby’, 12k, 2014.  Also Presented As A Sound Installation.

[2.]:  Janek Schaefer, ‘Asleep At The Wheel’, Multi-Media Interactive Installation, IF Milton Keynes International Festival, 2010.

[3.]:  David Cronenberg (Dir.), 'Crash', Canada/UK, Alliance Communication Corp./The Movie Network/Recorded Picture Company, 1997.

[4.]:  Or indeed, a kind of Post Modern relish for the Baroque excesses of custom car culture or the spectacular rituals of drag racing.  I'm aware of the irony.

[5.]:  These include the extensive audio elements played within the cars, along with Schaefer's accompanying 'Glovebox Mixtape'.  The latter is also presented as a cassette, designed to be kept in a car.  It is full of gorgeous drones and ambiences, and not unlike 'Lay-By Lullaby' in tone.  It omits the traffic noise of the latter for the most part though, which might, of course, be provided by one's journey in real time.