In his book ‘Ghost and Ghoul’ (1962) Thomas Charles Lethbridge writes of a theory that stone architecture and natural materials like quartz have the ability to serve as recording devices, capturing historical traumas that can later be teased out by contemporary bodies, who act as organic detectors, decoders and amplifiers. This was popularised by the 1972 BBC Television series ‘The Stone Tape’. Further information of the Stone Tape Theory can be found below:
Following the movie’s popularity, the idea and the term “stone tape” were retrospectively and inaccurately attributed to the British archaeologist turned parapsychologistT. C. Lethbridge, who believed that ghosts were not spirits of the deceased, but were simply non-interactive recordings similar to a movie. (Wikipedia: Stone Tape)
There’s a piece of music called Rocket by Alex Giannoscoli that was released around a year ago now. At the beginning of the song one can hear the sounds of restless dogs, collars jangling and claws skitting and tapping the floor feverishly. Paired with the music, it creates this weird sense of nostalgia for an existence that I haven’t quite lived, conjuring imagery of the fields that I’ve experienced but in a context seemingly more meaningful in a way that I can’t describe. It makes me remember things differently which is a strange feeling. This is what I think I’d like to be able to do with my paintings. When I was younger I used to be really into open world gaming like Skyrim, but was really bad at combat control and so instead often opted to spend hours walking or swimming around the virtual worlds mapped out to explore. It was always so exciting to stumble across a randomly generated event or encounter in the middle of a deserted valley or cave, a series of code not waiting to be triggered by your proximity as a “conscious” character but one that would’ve run whether you were there or not.
The other feeling generated by those games that I never quite managed to experience when out by myself in reality was that of being totally alone in these landscapes, being able to enjoy them without risk of surveillance. I grew up in a small rural village where everyone knows everyone and I worried that if someone had seen me out walking by myself it would look weird and awkward, something that as a younger teenager I was overly self conscious about. Again, this feeling that maybe what you see could only be experienced by chance, the end of it being caught whilst wondering alone, is something I want to achieve within my work.
I actually visited this exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ a few weeks ago, just before the course started. According to the press release, Zhongguo 2185, whose title was drawn from Liu Cixin’s 1989 ‘critical utopian’ Science Fiction novel, was “an exhibition of ten young artists from China, whose works address the shifting cultural contexts of China – past, present, and future – while also moving far beyond those social and geographical confines. The exhibition harnesses the ‘critical openness’ that early Chinese Science Fiction utilised and advocated in the face of authoritarian rule. It gestures towards potential futures while also constructing a critical vision of the past and present.” (1)
The themes of science fiction and ‘futures’ was certainly prevalent throughout the exhibition. In Occupation (2017), for example, Xu Qu uses damaged police surveillance technology (old camcorders) to construct a sculpture similar to Buddhist prayer beads. The irreversible damage to these once-cutting-edge pieces of hardware, which now sit as relics covered in a dirty resin, paired with a duo of screens nearby showing a film made completely of digitally rendered graphics, highlights the shift towards software-based, entirely digital practices are being used to make art. I understand that this wasn’t the point of the exhibition but thought it was interesting. The current growing trends towards the digital, towards 3D rendering and seemingly towards moving image are exciting, and are something that I am interested to watch progress, but sometimes I feel that they’re used just for the sake of it. Lu Yang’s digital rendering piece (pictured below right, left screen) for example seemed to just be a relentless array of low-quality, sims-like images that maybe wouldn’t be out of place if seen within a meme format found on 4chan or Facebook’s ‘Vaporwave Sadposting’ page. I have a feeling that this type of rendered image, because of how new it is as a usable technology, how ‘out of place’ it feels in a gallery space and yet how familiar it is to millennials who’ve grown up to link nostalgia with poor quality video-game graphics, will be the new ‘one-liner’ art of this generation. I don’t hate it by any means, and am even interested in incorporating it into my own work as I feel it’s a new form of painting. I’m just conscious that it could become a gimmick.
(2)
Other works in the exhibition included the giant inflatable head, also by Lu Yang, which due to its size unavoidably became the centrepiece of the exhibition. I did think this was interesting as it provided an example of how to make the digital image tangible in a very in-your-face way, through scale (obviously) and the integration of hardware (the lights in the eyes).
There was also a large wall-based painting next to this head that caught my eye, which I actually hated. However, what drew my attention was the way in which it had been fixed to the wall. (3)
Instead of regularly placed fixings along the perimeters of the painting, it had instead been stabbed in random areas along the course of the piece by large metal cylinders, possibly magnets. This elevated the work somewhat for me, and although I don’t know the context for or understand this decision fully, it added a weirdly sculptural element to the piece, became an integral part of it aesthetically as well as functionally.
From a technical viewpoint, I also really enjoyed Tang Dixin’s paintings, although I thought that they became a bit lost within the ‘louder’ and more technology-driven pieces in the space. His paintings jump between the recognisable and surreal, layering and multiplying figures and limbs until a nightmarish creature is created.
After a quick look through ‘Itchy All over’, a book comprising of almost all his work, I also learnt that he does a lot of performance work, such as ‘Floating’, ‘I Will Be Back Soon’ and ‘Act of God’ (documented below).
(4)
Tang Dixin, Floating, 2009, Performance (5)
Tang Dixin, I will be back soon, 2009, Performance
(6)
Tang Dixin, Act of God, 2012, Event
According to Aike Dellarco Gallery, “Tang Dixin’s paintings, as much as his live performances, are filled with radical and extreme tensions, bringing alive the same sense of absurdity and wildness that inform his performances. His paintings evoke situations that lie between the realms of possibility and impossibility, and probably constitute a different platform for the artist to stage ‘fictional performances’ that challenge the laws of physics. Tang Dixin’s performance art and paintings mirror each other – though the two are directly opposed, they rely on and refer to each other. The artist’s physical body is what links the two halves – a concrete form imbued with abstraction.” (7) The idea of using paintings to stage performances that bypass the laws of physics is a way of looking at it that I’ve never come across before, but I suppose maybe it should have been obvious.
(Personal reference) The artists featured in Zhongguo 2185 are Lu Yang (born 1984, Shanghai, China), Tianzhuo Chen (born 1985, lives and works in Beijing, China), Yu Ji (born in Shanghai, 1985, lives and works in Shanghai), Zhang Ruyi (born 1985, Shanghai), Sun Xun (born 1980, lives and works in Beijing), Nabuqi (born 1984, Inner Mongolia, China), Chen Zhe (born 1989, Beijing, China), Xu Qu (born 1978, Jiangsu, China), Tang Dixin (born 1982, Hangzhou, China), and Lu Pingyuan, (born 1984, Zhejiang province, China) (8)
(1) (8) Sadie Coles Press release for ‘Zhongguo 2185’, 2017
http://www.sadiecoles.com/exhibitions-press-release/zhongguo-2185-curated-by-victor-wang
I find the idea of performing to a lack of audience very interesting. Perhaps it stems from a personal fear of doing anything with an audience or how I miss the feeling of not being under constant surveillance when growing up rurally, butthe idea of performing and giving something to your surroundings rather than a sentient audience is one that I’d like to explore.
In a lecture last week, I was introduced to the work of Richard Long, who in the 60s used to travel out to rural areas and create works such as ‘A Line Made By Walking’, ‘England’ and ‘Walking A Line in Peru’. (see below).
Richard Long, A Line Made By Walking, 1967 (1)
Richard Long, England, 1968 (2)
Richard Long, Walking A Line in Peru, 1972 (3)
It’s similar to minimalist sculpture and indeed he did call it a sculpture, yet it exists only as a photograph, a record of the temporary impression he made in the ground. Similarly, his piece ‘Ben Nevis/Hitch-Hike’ exists now only as a set of photographs of the sky and ground paired with a map. That is now the piece. Long’s work ties into the idea of art as form versus art as idea, with form merely being a vehicle for presentation. The act of doing was the real piece, and there’s something beautiful about art being so temporary. Gabriel Orozco’s work ‘Extensions of reflection’ also focused on this sense of temporality. The photographs he took (see below) of breath on a piano or wet tire tracks protruding out of a puddle for ‘Extension of Reflection’, for example, aren’t the primary thing that we’re viewing. What we’re asked to enjoy is the fact that these are ephemeral, spontaneous gestures lost in the world but recorded for us to view.
Gabriel Orozco, Extension of Reflection, 1992 (4)
Gabriel Orozco, Breath On Piano, 1991 (5)
Francis Alys’ piece ‘The Loop’ is another example of this. The Belgian artist, who “uses poetic and allegorical methods to address political and social realities, such as national borders, localism and globalism, areas of conflict and community, and the benefits and detriments of progress” (6), undertook the process of travelling from Tijuana, Mexico to San Fransisco, America without crossing the border between the two. However, what remained of this ambitious and heavily political journey for the audience to experience was a mere postcard. Of course, the postcard itself as an object isn’t the work, but the clearest and most relevant way to display the artist’s actions. It’s his idea and the event that followed that was the work, the postcard merely being a way to explain it.
Last year, I also came across the video work of a young German artist, whose name I have since lost. One of her pieces consisted of filming herself, from behind, alone in a field wearing a white biohazard suit and dancing to a herd of deer. It was quite surreal as a viewing experience, watching her carry on relentlessly to this un-reacting audience. However, because she filmed it and is now displaying it at least online, does that allow the deer to become the main audience? Or do they become props for the human viewer to consume second-hand? This idea of having to clearly document something to solidify it as a ‘happening’ is one that interests me greatly.
This is something I want to explore myself. The Polish Theatre Director Gratowski, who was inspiration for Joachim Koester’s film ‘Maybe One Must Begin With Some Particular Places’, used to create intersections of performance, anthropology and ritualism by taking his actors out into rural areas and making them do audience-less performances, with only the landscape watching them. (7) I would like to do something similar, by staging an audience-less wrestling match in a remote location. At the moment I’m thinking of filming it but with the camera facing the other way. The sound would act as evidence but the performance itself would be lost, viewed only by the surrounding landscape. I want the audience to be as unknowing of the event happening in front of them as the land would have been, with the video serving not as the piece but a mere record of the piece. As a record, does it have to show everything?
Raoul De Keyser is a really brilliant painter that I only found out about a few days ago through Paint Club, a student-run group that the painters across all stages of Fine Art at Chelsea have set up to discuss painting not in the context of the contemporary art sphere but just as a process, a medium and a result. De Keyser’s handling of paint itself is beautifully deliberate yet not overworked: he lets paint be paint on a surface, which is something that I’m currently very conscious of (and struggling with) within my own paintings. Although obviously abstract, the shapes in his works are considered and undeniably referential to something in real life, almost recognisable but just out of reach. Again, as with Wade Guyton’s work in my last post, there’s this idea of fracturing and recombining imagery in his work. In the first painting shown above for example, he simply inserts the sky in perfect rectangular blocks into the composition, immediately shifting perception away from anything directly figurative.
Chris Orr
(5)
(6)(7)
The composition of Orr’s work, based entirely on found imagery (“vintage magazines, Ladybird storybooks, science textbooks, Old Master paintings, newspaper articles and slides that he has found” (8)) with obvious historical stylistic references, is fairly classical in the way its painted. However, there’s something about the figures within these Turner-esque landscapes that doesn’t quite fit, giving the work a surreal edge. However, what I find most interesting is the orange underpainting.
Lynette Yiadaom-Boakye
(6) (7)(8)
Lynette Yiadom-Boake creates fictional characters from only scrap drawings, found imagery and her imagination (as with Chris Orr above), yet instills a strong presence within them, one that exists outside of a specific time or place. In a 2010 interview with Nadine Rubin Nathan in the New York Times Magazine, Yiadom-Boakye described her compositions as “suggestions of people…They don’t share our concerns or anxieties. They are somewhere else altogether.” (9) This lack of fixed narrative, although maybe not as severe as the abstract works of De Keyser above, leaves her work open to the projected imagination of the viewer, something that I think will always be an important within my own work.
Corinna Spencer
(10) (11) (12)(13) (14) (15)
Corrina Spencer creates a similar sense of enigma within her dark portraits, but in a more jarring sense. Similar to Yiadom-Boakye, she paints portraits of women, often imaginary but sometimes inspired directly by old photographs, like photo booth pictures, mug shots, wedding photographs and Victorian mourning portraits, sourced on the internet. There’s something so incredibly uncomfortable and smothering about this work yet also a possible humourous side to it, which I find interesting.
(1,2,3,4) The Renaissance Society, Press Release, 2001, Author Unknown
http://www.renaissancesociety.org/exhibitions/424/raoul-de-keyser/
(5,6,7,8) Hauser and Wirth, Press Release, 2007
https://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/20/christopher-orr/view/
(6,7,8,9)Jack Shaman Gallery, Artist Profile, 2014, Author Unknown
http://www.jackshainman.com/artists/lynette-yiadom-boakye/
After a suggestion from my tutor, I recently visited Wade Guyton’s exhibition at The Serpentine Gallery. Having heard about him from a mention in David Joselit’s essay ‘Marking Time’ in the book ‘Painting Beyond Itself’ (1): The Medium in the Post-Medium Condition’, I was excited to see the work in the flesh. According to the press release, Guyton is interested in “the translations that take place between these tools, transforming three-dimensional space into digital information that is subsequently reproduced on surfaces and in space.” (2), something that I feel relates to my current line of work and of course to painting in general. The relationship between painting and the digital is ever more poignant, and the way that Guyton manages to manipulate consumer-grade printers to create the same kind of stored energy that a painting has is remarkable. The inconsistencies caused by technical faults, low toner levels and dirty rollers is so beautifully painterly, especially when used to reproduce webpages and iPhone adverts, images that are perfectly programmed to be pristine and unchanging. Guyton’s use of this second hand imagery as subject matter, something that he believes in strongly, seemed particularly relevant to me as its something I’m grappling with conceptually at the moment. I thought that hereally pushed the aesthetic possibilities of online imagery through enlarging it, allowing the pixels to become a hazy kind of mark making, diffusing the black and white text we’re so used to seeing on screens. There are of course other artists exploring this potential such as Dan Hayes and Emily Motto, and I myself spent a lot of time trying to push it last year in foundation. It’s something that I’d like to return to in my work soon.
I also loved the fracturing of imagery down the centre of every canvas, created perhaps for practical reasons through folding the linen canvases before inserting them into the printers. Although both halves are of the same image, quite often a pre-determined, staged one, the divide creates a real sense of fluidity and movement, a slight rift in time.
(1) Bra w, I. and Lajer-Burcharth, E. (2016) Painting Beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-Medium Condition, Berlin: Steinberg Press.
I am currently working on a small book/publication, which displays every image of a landscape I’ve ever taken on my current phone (which I’ve had for around 4 years) paired with an image found on Flickr and taken on the same day, up to 2400 miles away from where I took my photo. The distance between the two photos is determined by the time of day when I took the photo in question, e.g. if it was taken at 16:23, the secondary image would have to be taken somewhere along the perimeter of a 1623 mile radius of the original photo’s location. This factor is a way in which I’ve tried to curb the level of control over the process, leaving the product up to a chance photographer in a chance location, generated by a number I unintentionally “chose” when I took the photo.
The idea is that when paired physically in a book, we may start to form connections between the two scenes that aren’t there. There have been a few occasions where the images have slight aesthetic similarities; formal coincidences. Even though I know that these don’t mean anything and are completely accidental, it’s hard not to believe that it’s a conscious choice, to romanticise it, to feel an connection (if unrequited) to the photographer on the other end of whatever-mile radius I typed into Google maps. Simultaneously, by pairing my own pictures with those of strangers, it’s dampened my own deeply personal connections to the often ambiguous and probably cheesy landscapes and sunsets stored in my phone. For me, they unlock whole days’ worth of memories surrounding them and I can usually remember which date and which exact location they were taken on, even if they’re years old. Archiving dates and events mentally is something I’ve always done instinctually and to a useless degree, and photos on my camera roll are an important part of solidifying that process. It’s therefore quite an uncomfortable experience when they’re stripped back down to the level of personal attachment that I feel towards photos of unknown places taken by unknown people.
Going through the highly repetitive system of inputting dates, distances and locations into a system and relying completely on chance for an outcome soon became incredibly tedious. However, I feel there’s something important about having a system and sticking to it, even if it results in a poor outcome. There are of course a number of artists who have already made art through obsessively rigorous systems that they devise for themselves and then stick to, such as John Cage’s sound pieces reliant on the audience, Dieter Roth and his piece ‘Flat Waste’, Donald Judd and his Fibonacci-related works, and other artists who adopted the Minimalist approach of not making decisions based on taste but instead reliant on an external, non-negational factor.
So far I have 218 items, making approximately 168 pairings. I have added more every day since I started the project.
Reluctant as I am to even admit that I watch anime, there’s something really interesting and stylish about how it seems to deal with physics. Within almost every film/show I’ve watched, there seems to be a repetition of this delay between action and reaction: a character’s hair waiting just a second longer to obey gravity than the rest of him; a sweeping reflective glimmer on a weapon that’s just stopped moving. This strange delay and tension between movements makes time feel like its constantly changing velocity, and reminds me in a way of the same odd moments of still tension between wrestlers as they grapple against each other with almost equal force. The two could be interesting to combine. There is of course also the iconic style of anime, which could be interesting when compiled with more western, classical landscape scenes, for example.
(1) GIF taken from Akira, Dir. Atom, K., Tokyo Movie Shinsha, Japan, 1988
(2) GIF taken from Kill La Kill, Dir. Imaishi, H., Adult Swim, America, 2013-2014
https://anime.aminoapps.com/page/item/kill-la-kill/pLtp_IqLrz5qM7oQqLqVBBZdNljL6V
