Cabin Gallery, probably due to its location in Southfields, near Wimbledon, doesn't get quite the attention its shows deserve. For those who didn't quite make it, here are my recent texts to accompany those shows...
FRONT PARTING
6 May - 11 June 2016
London-based
young Franco-Belgian Aglaé Bassens’ recent shows have, you might say,
made something out of nothing, gracefully uncovering the atmospheric
melancholy in empty fish tanks, viewless windows, curtains and sofas. At
CABIN, though, such reifications of emptiness are outnumbered by a new
stream which, you might say, makes nothing out of something. We are
pretty-much defined by our bodies and our heads, but Bassens presents
only partial views of them: claustrophobic, awkward, intimate perhaps,
but also shuttling those subjects back towards emptiness.
Other
painters have made this move, but have tended to use a hyperreal
technique of objective scrutiny. Ellen Altfest provides a good example:
every follicle and wisp is painstakingly captured in her tightly-cropped
sections of hirsute male flesh. Bassens, in contrast, carries on with
her distinctively fluid, rapid, intuitive application of paint, which
points to colour field abstraction rather than photorealism. How, she
was asked recently at her extensive show at the Revue Gallery, do you
create the impression of painting with single strokes? ‘I paint with
single strokes’, she replied. Yet the results, like Altfest’s,
oscillate between desire and detachment. After all, when do you really
pay attention to how hair is parted other than when homing in on the
minutiae of a loved one? Surely that peep-through of ear is waiting to
be nibbled? And when do you look closely at how a shirt buttons up,
other than when you intend to unbutton it? The more so, perhaps, in a
fresh infatuation, in which context the third subject of Bassens’
paintings at Cabin – the curtained window – may signal the potential for
pulling aside any obstructions to new experience.
As Bassens
says, ‘the title ‘Front Parting’ suggests an element of sensuality to
these new works, or at least of self/other and male/female’. There is
also a literal aspect. We see a front-parted hairstyle in Forehead, one
of the apparently female extracts here. And where is a shirt, which
reads naturally as male here, parted other than at the front? And a
curtain too, come to that? Yet a certain plangency remains in play, for
parting also evokes loss. A curtain, after all, can be an exercise in
frustration as well as temptation. Now that I think of it, that’s the
other context for the partial view: glimpses of what you’d like to be
closer to, are keen to experience whole, and yet cannot. ‘We passed on
the stairs, and the way she parted her hair haunts me still…’.
There
are other ways, separate from the seemingly casual handling of paint,
in which Bassens’ work departs from realist models. The framing and
staging of the image tends to call attention to the choices being made
and presented to us. Indeed, Bassens has sometimes included the process
of painting in the painting. That staging extends to the scale,
especially if what seems insignificant is blown up as big as Big Shirt
Painting (there’s a twist of humour there, too: what’s big, the shirt or
the painting?). Moreover, to monumentalise the partial view is to make
it an explicit strategy, not a playful failure to fit the whole in. ‘I
was interested’, she says, ‘in being so close to something you cannot
see it’, in a phrase which retains a mournful undertow, as it might
equally apply to the failure to remain objective or to the flaws in a
relationship revealed only by a traumatic event. Bassens also has one
eye on the history of art. The window can stand for plenty in that, and
there’s a long history of white abstraction – it’s enough of a cliché
that Yasmina Reza’s play Art revolves around it. The shirt and curtain
paintings nod to that modern trope, though what the shirts remind me of
more are snowscapes. Those blues have crept in from Monet and Pissarro.
Then the ear in Ear plays the role of Fontana’s slash in the canvas.
This
is the point at which we could hurtle on all the way to Freud. But
actually I don’t believe it’s there in the work. That’s just the sort of
interpretation Susan Sontag was against, one which imposes a
metaphorical straightjacket on what the artist really means. There is a
sensual tug here, but it’s placed in a setting which holds our
engagement in check. Such art is reflective, rather than directly
empathetic, and reflective art, said Sontag, though it ‘should not be
frigid’, should be set up such that ‘the pull towards emotional
involvement is counterbalanced by elements in the work that promote
distance, disinterestedness, impartiality. Emotional involvement is
always, to a greater or lesser degree, postponed’.[i] Sontag spoke of
‘the erotics of art’, implying that we should approach it through
sensuous engagement with form rather than seek a metaphorical
interpretation of what it means. She wanted ‘transparence’, which she
glossed as ‘experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of
things being what they are’.[ii] Circling back to how Bassens hooks us
in to the world by applying a fluent painterliness to unexpected
subjects, ‘transparence’ may be the word which catches how she makes
something out of painting what seems nothing, and why she doesn’t quite
make nothing out of painting something. Sontag, I reckon, would look at
this show and ask: ‘see what I mean?’.
[i] Susan Sontag: Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson, 1964
[ii] Susan Sontag: Against Interpretation, 1964
MOONBLINKING
18 March - 16 April 2016
Willem
Weismann explains an old practical joke from his native Netherlands:
‘look at the squashed nose in this book’, you say, showing someone the
open spread. As they peer in close to see, you snap the book shut on the
nose. Just so, Weismann’s paintings trammel wittily between image,
process and reality. Just so, you are lured in – typically by a
harlequinade of inventory and colour – only to realise that the scenario
shown is some sort of end game for the world. But also, typically, it’s
difficult to get overly stressed by this: the slightly kooky figures in
their rainbow splendour are hard to take seriously as tragic figures;
it’s only a slap on the nozzle, after all.
In fact, there was a
lot of close peering into books in Weismann’s show at The Nunnery last
year. He was implicitly comparing them with paintings: the same feeling
of a dated medium, the same one-on-one artist grappling with his means
of expression at desk or easel, the same reader /viewer need to slow
down to take in the result, the same net-provoked tendency not to do so.
Clearly, he felt a common cause, and though books aren’t prominent in
Moonblinking, it’s evident that Weismann still values the ancient
pattern of individualist creation with the hope of creating engaged
individual responses.
As you approach Cabin, there’s a fairly
typical Weismann in the window, facing out. A character, bordering on
caricature, stares through binoculars. Is he spying on us? Is he
surveying the scene, more benignly and a little optimistically, for
visitors to the show? Or is he, as the painting’s title, ‘Signs of Life’
suggests, scanning a post-apocalyptic scene? Whichever way, you might
think him an odd fellow, scratching an obscure symbol in the sand,
equipped with battered travel case and clunky old mobile phone, wearing a
baseball cap with a binocular-length peak and a multi-coloured top more
like a pinafore than a shirt – and which has actually served as the
palette on which he’s put the colours for the painting. That last move
is normal in Weismann’s world, reminding us of where we are. Weismann
dreams up his scenarios in the studio, he doesn’t take them from
photographic sources or models, and so the inclusion of the palette,
which occurs in various playful ways, serves to make his whole
self-contained system transparent. In pointing to the painting as a
painting, it allow us to read that garment / palette as clothing, as
abstract patterning, as paint made explicit, as an index of the painting
as a whole.
That’s the move which Tom Morton has identified [i] as
lampooning those who speculate on the ‘death of painting’. The paintings
are mocking the demise supposedly faced by the medium.
If you’ve
seen Weismann’s work before, though, you’re in for a conk-squish of
surprise when you enter the gallery. The paintings are dark. They use
black oil only, with glimpses of bare canvas serving as light.
Perversely, as it seems, Weismann has decided to see what’s left of his
signature style when its most prominent feature – those slightly crazed
edge-of-clashingchromatic blitzes suggestive of slight colour blindness
– are removed. There are still blobby signs that Weismann has wiped his
brushes on the canvas, but they merge into the gloom – if you weren’t
looking for them, you wouldn’t spot them – and they could be
self-parodic, for what’s the point of a palette with only one colour on
it?
ON DROOL
12 February - 12 March 2016
We
know what life is: rough and smooth, ugly and beautiful, cheap and
expensive. Likewise the world: land and sea, fantasy and reality, now
and then. But modernity can blur those boundaries: just to take death -
in the hospital, not on the gallows; few starve on the streets; most
lynchings take place by social media. Wind back 600 years and the
delineations were sharper: saint and sinner, master and servant, freedom
and slavery. Kate Lyddon is something of a medievalist, and such
distinctions course through her work. Indeed, her recent show at the
Zabuldowicz Collection revolved around wood spirits and bark witches.
Lyddon,
then, trades in the clash and reconciliation of oppositions. That, in
philosophical terms, might make her a contrastivist of sorts.
Contrastivism is an epistemological theory, which is to say it deals
with how we gain our knowledge of the world. That theory’s adherents say
that knowledge is not a relation of the obvious two places – not, for
example, ‘she knows it is purple’ – but of three, eg ‘she knows it is
purple rather than blue’. That implies that she might not know that ‘it
is purple rather than magenta’ – those are different degrees of
knowledge. So, in Lyddon’s case, we might say not simply ‘she knows it
is beautiful’ but ‘she knows it is beautiful rather than ugly’. The
contrasts are entwined. We might be reminded of the defence of God for
allowing suffering: what is pleasure without the possibility of pain?
Lyddon’s twist, though, is that beauty doesn’t merely operate in the
context of ugliness, but that they are potentially interchangeable
categories. Not only do we define the beautiful partly by reference to
the ugly, but the ugly may come to be seen as beautiful.
Lyddon
enacts this contrastivism through both content and materials. Her
portraits, if that’s the right term for imagined faces, use the
traditionally significant medium of oil on canvas - expensive enough in
pre-modern times that having one’s likeness made was indicative of
wealth and status. Just so, Portrait [Woebegone] is wearing a ruff and Portrait [Blood-Red]
a crown. That sets up the expectation of flattery, seriousness and
impressive form and colour. What we get, though, is a cast of
curiously-hued oddballs who seem decidedly unlikely to have been able to
pay for their depictions, or – we might assume – to want to be
depicted. Their features are, on the face of it, ugly by conventional
standards. Are they diseased? Lyddon takes an interest in freak shows,
medical history and in disfiguring conditions such as epidermodysplasia verruciformis
or Tree-man Illness. Or perhaps they’re wounded - we might think of the
disturbing aesthetics of Henry Tonks’ paintings of World War I
casualties.
And yet... isn't there also a certain allure here? Portrait [Peely-Wally]’s
skin is a potentially cool blue, and the decoration which doesn't so
much emphasise as take over the eyes could be a fashion of the future.
The nose on Portrait [Liverish] is decidedly porcine, but
perhaps our aesthetics should extend beyond the human, as well as beyond
the narrow expectations of gender which these androgynous characters
seem to evade. These figures are beautifully ugly. Or, looking in the
other direction, consider how ugly beauty can seem: the inflated
collagen lips, frozen Botox expressions and lurid orange tans arrived at
in the name of beauty can push beyond its conventions into quite
different territory.
And there’s another ambiguity: are these
accurate portraits, or is this just how the artist has chosen to
represent her subjects, reflecting a diversion into the pleasures of
using her materials? Is it that the king's face is distorted to melting
point in an eerie match for his elongated earrings, or has Lyddon
exaggerated the earrings and carried that over into a face which
replaces reality with a different potential for beauty - the painterly?
Lyddon’s sculpture, too, contains contrasts of both material and
content. On the material side, ceramic and copper play off polystyrene
and cast-off table legs. All the signs are that they are valued equally,
and that Lyddon enjoys the way different materials provoke different
responses. Clay-rather-than-polystyrene and polystyrene-rather-than-clay
work more strongly for Lyddon in the context of how they could have
been each other. So far as content goes, where the portraits do, by and
large, appear whole, the sculptural characters are incomplete. Yet
maybe we're in the superficialising grip of conventional expectation
once more. The ‘aesthetic of the fragment’ is well known, but isn’t
conventionally applied to the living or the new. Why not go further, by
collaging together those chosen elements and – embracing the grotesque –
arrange body parts as surreal conjunctions of found objects?
Those two aspects are plain in Lower Limb with Spoon and Straw,
in which a one-legged form, resplendent as a limb can be in scarlet
Lycra leggings, relies on a copper pipe as an implausibly thin stand-in
for his second leg. He’s lost his torso and arms entirely, and his head
to the extent that it’s rolling on the floor. Where it used to be
attached, the neck’s severance reveals the crudeness of the polystyrene
of which he’s made.
Put the paintings and sculptures together, and
you won’t be surprised to learn that Lyddon used to make paintings with
all sorts of collage elements applied to generate that clash and
reconciliation of opposites: it felt like Bacon meets Klee meets
Quasimodo meets My Little Pony all on the canvas with scrawled lyrics to
boot. Now paintings and objects have gone their separate ways, but come
together as an installation in which copper tubes and cutlery act as
connectors. The pipes remind us of plumbing inside the body, and their
striping of a barber's pole. It’s said that such signs originally
mimicked the bandaging after the medieval service of bloodletting
(barber, surgeon and dentist being less distinct roles 600 years
ago). If the copper tubes, then, stand in for the body’s processes of
flow and waste, then the spoons stand in for sustenance. A circuit is
proposed, related to the biggest contrast of all. There’s a play on the
nobility of being ‘born with a silver spoon in the mouth’, while making
it plain that - however valuable the implement - it all goes down the
same way. As do we, in Larkin’s words, ‘down the long slide / To
happiness, endlessly’ – in High Windows’ elision of another contrast,
from the life-giving force of sexual discovery towards the only
conclusion of our pursuits.
Cheer up, though! For Lyddon, like
Larkin, brings an irrepressibly enjoyable relish to her account of the
human condition. There’s more comedy than tragedy in her contrastivist
account of how history has brought us to this beautifully ugly pass. If
all human experience, bodily and psychic, feeds through Lyddon and into
her art, then On Drool is ‘about life’. It sounds trite to say
so, but that’s how the work takes on its own – far from trite – life in
practice. And, after all, what other subject is there?
Jonny Briggs
TO EAT WITH THE EYES
20 November - 31 December 2015
The
family is not what it was. Our lives are far more fluid, geographically
and affectively, than they used to be. Quite likely your parents have
divorced and live hundreds of miles from each other and you. Quite
likely it wouldn’t occur to you to follow in their professional or
social footsteps. Quite likely you have enough choices, physically and
virtually, to feel that blood relationships are or could be only a small
part of your life picture. Yet we’d all accept that our family
background is a formative influence on who we are. Most of us keep that
in the back of our minds, and move on: so successfully that there has
been recent press coverage of a trend for adult children ‘abandoning’
their ageing parents.
Moving on isn’t enough for Jonny Briggs,
though. He wants to break more radically. “Escape,” wrote Emmanuel
Levinas [i], “is the need to get out of oneself, that is, to break that
most radical and unalterably binding of chains, the fact that the I is
oneself.” For over a decade, Briggs’ art has attempted to achieve that.
As he puts it: ‘I try to think outside the reality I was socialised into
and create new ones with my parents’. Here, of course, a paradox lurks:
for can a self which is largely formed by how and where it came into
being ever truly break free from the background which indirectly
determines the nature of those very escape attempts?
Briggs is, of
course, aware of the problem. That gives his work an edge which feeds
into his own embrace of paradox at the level of individual works. And
the effort does lead him somewhere, even if it he can’t get where he
hoped to go. Imagine an athlete who sets himself the goal of running a
six second 100m. He won’t succeed, but if he trains hard enough he may
get to a place – say 10 seconds – he would not otherwise have reached.
Briggs
has used several approaches to these ends, in all of which we’re aware
of his presence as the artist, though it’s normally his parents whom we
see. He has directed them in photographic tableaux which – through his
controlling role as artist and photographer – reverse the parent-child
power relationship. He has treated the home as a metaphorical body,
especially when grappling with his grandmother’s cancer, and explored
the cognitive psychology of ‘context dependent recall’ – the way a place
can act as cue for memories. He’s turned around his memories by
montaging his parents’ heads onto photographs from his childhood. He
has made us think that he has constructed realities out of collaged or
photo-shopped elements, only for it to turn out that the situation is at
one level ‘real after all’.
‘To Eat with the Eyes’ approaches
those issues by different means: most of the works are detourned
versions of historic black and white photographs of his grandparents and
great grandparents. The alterations all reconfigure the gaze of his
relatives. Several are rendered monocular by a splicing which combines
their eyes. The effect is unsettling - maybe that’s why we speak of ‘the
evil eye’ rather than ‘the evil eyes’. The one all-seeing eye seems to
stare us down, oddly, more fully than two would. There’s something
forensic about the look: I’m put in mind of a security camera as much as
a person. Knowing Briggs’ trajectory, though, we’re bound to read these
as another attempt to alter the construction of his own identity, this
time by going back to earlier generations and recasting how they see
him.
The second group of photographs altered by what Briggs calls his
‘mindful vandalism’, it being more controlled than iconoclastic
destruction, is somewhat ironically entitled ‘the Envisionaries’. Here
Briggs obstructs his ancestors’ eyes by pinning lips onto them. That
makes for the right organs with which to ‘eat with the eyes’, and picks
up the suggestion in that phrase of the consuming appetites which sight
can stimulate. The prominence of the pins is, again, disturbing, and the
extra mouths do nothing to change the fact that the dead can’t speak.
The
contemporary colour images of Briggs’ mother provide a contrast. They
do set up oracular conjunctions, but the effect is more akin to a
comical wink to indicate connivance. If they’re sharp eyes, that may be
literally implied by how glass meets in the middle of them. That’s
caused by the technique of cutting and conjoining not just the image,
but the frame and mount as well, collaging the image as object.
The
forensic note returns in what seems at first and, indeed, second glance
like a rather attractive record of the woodland floor even if we guess –
rightly – that this is where Briggs grew up, making it something of a
primal scene for him. Near the lower right hand corner, though, you may
spot a mouth. Remember the opening scene of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet,
which zooms in on an ear in the grass? This may be just a photograph of
Briggs’ mother’s mouth, but it’s disquieting nonetheless, once found.
It plays another version of the mouth for eye pun through the title:
Peephole. But is it for dark forces to spy on us from under, or for us
to look through and check we’re safe?
All sorts of arcana feed in
to Briggs’ work: he mentions that the Japanese have a word for ‘cute
enough to eat’; talks of the Amazonian tribes who believe that it shows
great respect for the dead to eat them; the psychological theory of
transference; how much he’s just enjoyed visiting a mannequin factory;
that he’s experimenting with the practice of meditating with a partner
by them staring into each other’s eyes unceasingly. As such background
thinking indicates, these are not casual images, and Briggs plans his
effects with economically precise drawings which act as stage directions
for how his photographs will be set up. Yet the underlying issue
remains that comparatively simple paradox: how was I formed, and can I
escape that? Will I always be trapped in the nexus of the past, no more
able to move on completely than to literally eat with my eyes?
