ALEXANDER JAMES: ALL ICONS ARE FALSE
D-Contemporary, 23 Grafton St - Mayfair
To 30 May: www.dcontemporary.com
I've written the essay for this impressive show:
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| From 'All Icons Are False', 2016 |
USE OF WATER
If I were
called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.
Philip
Larkin [i]
What sort of artist
is Alexander James? It would be easy to align him with the YBA generation –
James was born in 1967. Here are big, brash, self-consciously flashy images
obsessed with death, exploiting the distortion of the world under water with a
slickness akin to advertising – the better to modernise and expose the classic
tropes of art history as being stuck in a different time and place. In fact, James
is more an abrasive outsider than fashionable insider, more in the mould of van
Gogh or Ensor, an artist of passionate intensity
who has pursued his particular vision for thirty years irrespective of trends,
and regardless of what others might think. ‘Artists must be sacrificed to their
art’, he has said, ‘like bees, they must put their life into the sting they
give’. James’ approach is spiritual without being religious as such – Larkin,
after all, is mocking religion in suggesting that it would make sense to
construct one. Indeed, James declares that those objects which are set up to
inspire devotion – say gods, money, possessions, brands, celebrities – should
not be treated as icons. It’s no surprise, though, to find that his practice has
been compared to that of a monk.
 |
| 'Grace' from 'Vanitas', 2009-13 |
James doesn’t see
himself as a photographer, more as a sculptor whose setting is water, but who
for practical reasons must record rather than retain the tableaux he
constructs. By way of demonstration, a skull floats permanently in an eerily
lit vitrine of water on the roof of his East London studio. What the
photographs lose in immediacy of encounter, though, they gain in aesthetic
modulation, and in the further category confusion of looking very like
paintings. I don’t find myself wishing that the photographs were sculptures or
paintings, but relishing the ways all three means feed into the images.
Spelling out his
purpose early, James titled his studio, formed in 1990, ‘Distil Ennui, to
extract the essence and beauty of life to appease world weariness’. He started
out with the classic Vanitas – arrangements
of fruit, flowers and dead animals emphasising that this world is fleeting, and
so striving for the things of this world is an empty pursuit – but with the
difference that his photographs are of objects submerged into black, velvet-lined tanks filled with highly purified
water – which he doesn’t light these directly: it’s only the
movement of water which causes the reflections which bring them into visual
being. James was a natural for the vanitas
theme. ‘Loss is a terrible thing’, he says, ‘unless you know how to celebrate
it. All negative things for me must be converted into a positive act of
creation’. James has completed many bodies of work since 1990, but has remained
consistent in both underlying subject and tone: the metaphysics and mechanics
of water inspire serious explorations of the world and its meaning.
 |
| From 'Swarm', 2010-11 |
James’ best
known works in the direct Vanitas mode may be those which, as if flying could
be swimming, put the short-lived butterfly under water (‘Swarm’, 2010-11 and
‘Transparency of a Dream’, 2013-14). I guess most people would try to work out
how to Photoshop that unlikely scenario, but not James. He breeds butterflies
in the studio, which is dotted with chrysalises, specifically the South
American Morpho genus, which is
naturally capable of entering a comatose state. He can then photograph them
underwater, alive and unharmed, with no need of post-production. The results
are unsettlingly beautiful.
 |
| 'The Great Leveller' from 'Vanitas' 2009-14 |
The watery
setting, then, affects the spectacle, but how does it alter the message of the
Vanitas? It might remind us that oceans
cover 71% of the planet’s surface, to which we tend to pay disproportionately
little attention. And, of course, global warming threatens to increase the
proportion of water to calamitous effect. We won’t be fishes out of water,
we’ll be butterflies in it. That constitutes a move from micro to macro warning
and, potentially, from acceptance to activism:
from Memento mori - ‘remember
you will die’, whatever you do, get used to it – to ‘remember the whole planet
will die – unless we act fast’.
 |
| ‘Arcana II’ from‘Rastvoyrennaya Pechal’ , 2014 |
James first placed people under water in images inspired by John Everett
Millais’ 1851-2 canvas ‘Ophelia’ and ‘La Jeune Martyr’, 1855, by Paul Delaroche
. He made those in London but, never one to make things easy for himself, in
2013 he decamped with seven tons of kit to set up in a derelict building in
Moscow. There he photographed Russians suspended in water for the first body of
work featured here, ‘Rastvoyrennaya Pechal’, as inspired by various classical
century paintings.
 |
| ‘Mycenaean II’ from ‘Rastvoyrennaya Pechal’, 2014 |
‘Rastvoyrennaya Pechal’, like all
James’ series, was heavy on pre-planning – from sketches, to handmade props, to
cutting and sewing all the garments worn, to training the models in yoga
exercises. It was equally sparing in post-production: all images are exposed on
10 x 8 film plates, then either chosen or rejected prior to the framing
decision – which James takes as seriously as the rest of the process. The most
impressive technical feat is how clear and light the figures appear to be
against blackness, generating a saintly aura. That dramatic and moral use of
light is characteristic of Caravaggio, and the titles reference classical Greek
mythology, adding more time periods into the mix. Moving to the present, there’s also an
interesting comparison possible with the leading Canadian photographer Ed
Burtynsky. His ‘Water’ series takes an aerial view which rends the spectacular
grandeur of torrents and deltas painterly, removing us from the experience of
being under or even close to the water, while emphasising its scale and
importance. Burtynsky’s is a system builder’s top-down vision in counterpoint
to James’ bottom up phenomenology.
Going to
church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;
 |
| 'Chanel' from 'Rosae', 2010 |
The second
component of the All Icons Are False show
is the ‘Rosae’ series (2010), in which underwater blooms are arranged to form
various signs. The red rose as a ‘symbol of unrelenting love’, says James, ‘is
juxtaposed against a deep dark void’. The void stands in for the vacuity
imputed to what is formed by the 20-60 roses which make up each representation.
This particular way of showing the symbols makes them look like the most modern
form of icon: the summary pictogram on a computer screen which links to a
programme. The ‘Rosae’ series is suitably shallow, both in its straightforward
presentation, and in the flatness which sees the flowers appear to float on the
surface rather than swim in the depths. Three major religions are invoked in
small format via the crucifix, the Star of David, and the Khalifar star and
crescent. The one commercial symbol, ‘Chanel', gets the biggest billing at 120
x 90cm. That may imply the greater
emptiness of the realm, the proposition then being that religious idols are
false, that brands and the celebrities who advertise them have become religious
equivalents in our culture, and that they are even less worthy.
 |
| 'Vitreous Love' from 'Glass', 2013 |
The show also
includes two quite different, and spectacular, images of roses in water. In the
large prints from the 'Glass' series of
transparent roses (2012), James uses a process which naturally removes the
pigment from the petals, leaving behind a fragile, skeletal structure which
appears - as if a rose would ever be clothed – somehow naked. The capillaries
are on view like flesh stripped of skin, making the flowers look very
vulnerable and redoubling the air of mortality evoked. Can a rose drown - in the
very water which also sustains a plant in life?
 |
The Vanitas series,
then, takes us back to still life of the Dutch golden
age, and the Russian figures to the Pre-Raphaelites, but with an Impressionist
infection. The images of the series ‘All
Icons are False’ itself bear some resemblance to paintings of flowers in water
– most obviously Monet's waterlilies – but look more like abstract paintings.
The scraped canvases of Gerhard Richter and the syncopated striations or
Jean-Paul Riopelle come most readily to mind. The slight variations in focus
and blurs from movement resemble by turns the effect of brushstrokes or smeared
paint.
My liturgy
would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,
The most literal and immediate effect
is of looking through a textured glass door, such as is most typically found –
appropriately enough – screening the watery goings-on of a bathroom. Second, the images look rather like a view of
a river from above, one which has perhaps been put through some sort of digital
distortion but retained its ripples. That is both correct and incorrect in a
satisfyingly teasing manner. Or maybe we’re looking more at a more magnified
zone: could it be the detail a butterfly’s wing or lizard’s skin? All those
impressions, though, are soon displaced by the references to stained-glass, as
that covers both form and content. Light
streams through from beyond, and the complex overlays generate the sense of an
intricate framework imposed separately from the composition, rather as the
leading operates in stained glass. The flowers could be those which appear in
stained glass imagery, and James has, in fact, been careful to research what
those would have been. He uses old varieties, returning us to how they looked
at the time when their own symbolism was most vivid. Nineteenth century church
goers would automatically have associated the rose with the Virgin Mary, the
white lily with purity, the tulip with grace. James also features the red Lilium Chalcedomicum, which he sees as a
link, through its prevalence in Galilee, back to the Sermon on the Mount.
To make the new series, James has taken 850 plate film photographs of 50
petal-heavy arrangements of flowers densely combined underwater, then variously
layered these ‘core plates’ on a scanner – up to four at a time – using both
positive and negative images. The rhythms which result are complicated, as not
only are several plates scanned, but both the natural forms of the flowers and
the wave effects of the water make their separate contributions. Various
unpredictable, semi-accidental effects arise from the process: topographically
complex overlapping; unexpected greyscales where colours combine; evidence of
movement in the water; strips where the edges of slides don’t quite align;
slides not yet fully dry stick together slightly; dark zones with a dominance
of negative images; the odd hair stuck between slides; gaps between slides
causing apparently differential focus. The result is an acceptance of the
contingent in sequence of semi-controlled accidents much as occurs in process
based abstract painting like Richter’s, and with the characteristic attraction
of allowing us to trace, or at least speculate on, what events have caused the
particular outcome.
 |
| From 'All Icons Are False', 2016 |
These are much more intricate images
than the ‘Rosae’. The combination of science and nature is not reduced to
ciphers as are commerce and religion. Where the roses suggest straightforward
surface effects, ‘All Icons Are False’ enacts a complex deconstruction and
rebirthing which resonates with the need James sees for ‘a spiritual
renaissance with nature’. And if art is
the other potential area of activity which – however bad much of it may be -
can be venerated when ‘all icons are false’, then its abstract qualities must
convey that here. No wonder James has spent many hours examining the images
closely to see which should be selected – those with the right balance of
rhythm and irregularity; with a Gothic undertone to the organic; with a
complex, unanticipatable-yet-harmonious interaction of hues.
It's pretty clear, then, that if James were asked to construct a religion he would make use of water. There’s a logic to that, for it sustains life and, insofar as it is threatened, so are we. Like Larkin, James would have little time for international commerce or the literalities of a creed, yet the aesthetic emerging from his theological approach to making art chimes very well with the poet’s conclusion to ‘Water’, in which Larkin seems to move beyond irony to a genuine epiphany:
And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.
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