A taste of writing
In addition to the texts below, visit the following sites for examples:
www.poppysebire.com Introduction to Danny Rolph, Singularity, reproduced from the book published by Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, and Cella,
www.divination.org.uk Text on website for the exhibition, ‘Divination’, b.22,
www.thenatureofthings.org ‘On “The Nature of Things”’, text on website for the exhibition The Nature of Things, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery and Birmingham Institute of Art & Design,
www.richardrome.co.uk
Richard Woods Flora & Fauna
Milton Keynes Gallery, June-August 2008
The exterior of Milton Keynes Gallery, June 2008
The designation of “sculpture” has not always sat easily on the work of the British artist, Richard Woods. The reason is not that it fails to satisfy the criteria of the idiom but that it is often, simultaneously, many other things besides, like painting, printing, architecture and design. Woods has proceeded to his current point of prominence within British contemporary practice by virtue of the acuity of his multidisciplinary practice and his intuitive discontent with the rigid divisions between the arts in the West that have been enforced by theorists and artists since the Renaissance. The strategy that has made the first successful has, in his case, laid bare the unnecessariness of the second in the post-modernist programme of the new century.
Woods exhibition at Milton Keynes Gallery should have been the moment when this busy, purposeful coverer of surfaces confirmed his reputation, at least within his own country. This institution, a small kunsthalle a half-hour from London and not yet a decade old, has through its strong leadership and consistently apposite programme quickly acquired the ability to “make names”; that it fell short of delivering that accolade on this occasion was only partly a shortcoming of the artist himself. His first solo presentation in a British public gallery offered Woods too much scope. In addition to tackling the venue’s three galleries, he was handed the exterior of the blocky, two-story building itself. Since Woods prefers to resurface walls, floors and ceilings with boldly-printed coloured patterns, this remarkable public commission gave him a good deal of territory to cover.
Flooring the interior with a repetitive scheme of boldly-colored, comic-book-style wood-grain panels – a sort of underfoot wallpaper or pastiche of the ubiquitous vinyl covering that cheaply and effectively “tarted up” thousands of dowdy British homes after the DIY revolution of the 1960s – unified the three rooms like a geometric ground in which a selection of wall- and floor-mounted objects was arranged. The installation was a reminder of how Woods’ aesthetic operates, slipping between tenets of painting, sculpture and interior design unself-consciously, grafting a new personality on to the locations he is let loose on, but one that is emotionally or culturally connected with the host’s characteristics. That sensitivity is both unsuspected at first in Woods’ rough-and-ready method and the secret of its impact. Woods sculpts space and imagination: it fuels the strong after-image which his work generates.
Woods applied the same method of making the inside floor to the building’s three principal external elevations. It is one he has used for about ten years since his concern with “overall” surfaces progressed from corralling diverse shapes and forms within layers of same-hued paint in a gallery to dispensing with the shapes and covering the gallery instead. He encloses a volume (more than he can be said to “clad” an area) with sheets of medium-density fiberboard tacked on to a substructure of timber battens.
At the same time, Woods’ method is lo-tech and effective. Notions like “beauty” and “finish” do not detain him, and his preference for peopled spaces (on occasion bringing the host venue’s displaced furniture back into the renovated area rather than demanding vacant possession) reflects this artist’s appealing generosity to his audience. His approach is slightly Punk and “fin” of the last “siècle,” and for all its presence at the edges, history is not unduly influential. Likewise
In another artist’s hands, the manoeuvre risked backfiring into social comment of a type that can appear condescending or critical of modern urban man’s material desires. Woods, however (who has undertaken other exterior “rebrandings” on minor and major scales since 2000), powers these logos into a curious meaninglessness as commercial symbols and into an invigorating optimism as civic art that has ditched history as its source and embraced the present. Flat these surfaces are not; humor and seriousness, emptiness and significance, banality and poignancy are compacted into a form that not so much masks as highlights its setting.
Which is maybe why the exhibition falls short. Having attached to the outside the most powerful argument for Woods’ viability as an aesthetic collaborator in the shapes and colors that epitomize our surroundings, more of the same once through the doors labored a point already established. In a sense, what was needed were answers to the question the “mural” asked about those contrasting facets in its make-up. The opportunity in this show was not to stretch Woods by the inch over the galleries’ square-footage but for him as a maker, and his audience, to be stretched through his ideas and materials.
By resisting the patterned ground the obvious breadth in this artist’s ideas and practices would have been exposed. With that, the prospect of measuring the full extent of this important artist at 40 could have been achieved. As it is, that will wait, for although this gallery’s willingness for the show’s subject to determine the installation is constantly refreshing, a surer curatorial hand may have emboldened Woods to depend less on what he knows towards what he truly promises. What he has pulled off here was more convincingly and confidently achieved by his excellent one-person show in November 2005 at
He will continue to floor and wall to huge effect, but the promise increasingly lies in the constructed objects and large-scale, framed “marquetry” panels of faux-coloured and printed woods, at the same time portents of and products from thriving studio activity. Although seldom seen, they were here. But Woods hid the light of this assured development beneath the bushel of a dynamic (and familiar) floor. Once visually extracted, they outshone the setting. Outstanding are the ideas in the story-less, elaborately patterned poles – really, lengths of off-cut printed wood, recycled and fastened into sides around an interior void – that lean nonchalantly, even non-plussed, here and there like puzzling, well-dressed visitors to their own show. As compelling are the “Flintstones” rock sculptures appropriately, for rocks, colored in tones of grey, mounted and plinthed forms that have not been carved or compounded but, well, drawn. In both, the fact that they are nothing but their comfortable, idiosyncratic selves (rather than functioning items, like furniture) is their greatest recommendation.
Woods embodies the interrogativeness and liberality that distinguish much contemporary British sculpture. Those features lies less in the eagerness for materials, especially those with insecure sculptural pasts – or a link with the “cool” experimentation of sixties modernism – than in the openness to “what works” and a general responsiveness to the culture that people are making for themselves. These artists have their inspirations (for Woods, they may range from fake Tudor architecture to toile de jouy to Gio Ponti) but what makes waves is their ability not to be overwhelmed by them and to raise interesting questions.
While this exhibition was less the survey of a forward-moving career that was hoped for and more a slender mid-career retrospective, its true importance may be its affect on the artist. This chance to take stock (and the allusion to a storekeeper is only half-intended) should presage an inevitable ascent.
© Martin Holman 2008
'Anna Barriball’ (review), Galleries, XXIII, 4 (September 2005)
ANNA BARRIBALL
Martin Holman
Anna Barriball’s central concern is with drawing. The channel through which her grasp on the material world flows, drawing – specifically, the act itself – is her tool for sustained empirical examination, and among the strongest sensations passed on to her audiences is the wonder of never exhausting possibilities in the same thing done over and over. No mark is the same, nor its pace, and no version becomes the definitive image.
Her work has the precision of economy; nothing is unnecessary. But she leaves open the door to the unexpected and accidental. The show at Newlyn (until 8 October) marks this London-based artist’s first major exhibition in her native county. Included in this month’s British Art Show 6, Barriball is an exciting emergent presence. Her work projects a quiet strength, bringing out facets that drawing can claim to embody.
Being inconclusive is one potent quality, not to deceive but to attract; a second is to materialise, but not to describe. Drawing the texture and surface of a brick wall, her dense graphite and clay pencil-marks travel across the paper like a computer printer head, resubstantiating the original as a flat simulacrum in grey black that emits a silver sheen in real light like an early photograph.
An aura embraces other works. Partly it is a consequence of the often long, anxious deliberation in their making: one senses the journey from idea to object. It is due, too, to the mix of source material. She uses paper, but also other people’s discarded items. Into photographs she breathes new life, choosing carefully a way to unlock the time and private history they harbour. By blowing soapy bubbles against their surfaces, Barriball transform them, but simultaneously they remain themselves.
In this double-life of ordinariness and the poetically exceptional lies tantalisingly the heart of her work. An idea thrown out often boomerangs back modified by flight, like the furniture she wraps or marks with overt and sometimes masked allusions to the body. Chair is swaddled in ballet-shoe ribbon, physically bound and formally measured out at the same time. Like everything she draws on (including film), the principal outcome is possibility. Unlike the train tracks into
‘What’s the (subject) matter? Something about Phillip Allen’, Miser & Now, 8 (summer 2006), pp.15-17
Martin Holman
What’s the (subject) matter?
Something about Phillip Allen
When Phillip Allen emerged from the Royal College of Art in 1992, he was anxious about two issues in painting. The first was ‘the subject’. For years he wondered about the subject in painting, and whether he had the right one or was looking in the right place for it. Gerhard Richter was largely to blame for an uncertainty that had seeped into Allen’s own perception of his identity as a painter. By no means was he alone in feeling this way, so great was Richter’s influence in young artists’ thinking in the early 1990s, and Allen admits that in retrospect his concern in that decade might have been misplaced.
The other issue was ‘the edge’. For Allen the perimeter of the paintable surface was an obstacle: the function of the edge, he persuaded himself, was to contain. Beyond this extremity he did not want his painting (at that time overtly figurative) to flow, a contention that prescribed the area at his disposal. It exerted a tension that pushed his imagery into the interior of the surface. The art was there to show artificiality; reality carried on outside. For Allen, the edge was painting’s Checkpoint Charlie.
Of these two preoccupations, it was Allen’s altercations with the edge that survived into the new century. Like a former obsessive recounting the compulsions that once controlled him, he admits to enjoying fracturing the boundary now, but is aware too that traces of his earlier behaviour live on. He draws everyday on to sheets of cream-coloured, A4-sized wove paper, and each drawing starts with a four-cornered box. It is freely marked out in felt pen inside the physical edge of the page, and it is a frame, an edge within an edge, a cordon.
The easy line with which Allen forms the frame is followed by the free, purposeful movement of the pen tip over the surface it encloses. His hand carves bold, practised marks that appear instinctively to know where they are leading. Where the shapes come from Allen claims not to know. They are not the cartoon-like coloured figures of earlier pictures, carried out on large sheets of newsprint; nor are they the Scalextric tracks made in cardboard that occupied him in the mid-1990s. These new beaded and belted forms have a doodle quality; some are curvy, others constructive, many random.
One theory of doodles maintains that the creation of objectified ideograms is spontaneous, an unconscious representation of the major gestalt; it triggers the nervous energy of the maker’s hand and arm. Because doodles are a sort of pictorial handwriting, another theory supposes that they reveal personality, as in Antonin Artaud’s “written drawings”, while the automatist line in surrealist imagery has been argued as a mixture of both the psychic and the nervous.
None of which overtly concerns Allen; he is not given to deep theoretical explications of his practice. He attributes the proliferation of sun-burst shapes, astral patterns and tornado plumes as readily to the visual experiences of walking down an East End street or to growing up around homes decorated with inter-war ornamentation, as to apparitions in his mind’s eye, whether induced by climate, reverie or other stimulants. For him, the function of this shape-making activity is clear: to get a process started. It gets Allen going. He arrives at the studio for a day’s work, and painting is the work that needs a start. Drawing activates him while the frame, he claims, identifies the area to work in. It is his equivalent of the bordered cell in a film-maker’s storyboard.
Many more drawings are made than kept, and the dozen or so that remain after embellishment with coloured felt pens are pinned to the studio wall. In most, that persistent frame is broken into. One motif that does this job is a row of squiggles top and bottom. They often accord with where gobbets of impastoed paint will be placed when the character of the drawing transfers to a primed MDF board. And it is the character that is carried forward, because two features particularly stand out in Allen’s method. The first is that the position of compositional elements appears quite well plotted in drawings. The second is that no single drawing survives into one complete painting; nor does the frame
Allen is reluctant to regard his drawings as a public component of his identity as a painter. They are the ‘politician’s wife’ in his practice: ever-present, relied on heavily, formative and kept out of view. One word that describes their value for him is ‘spline’, a mechanical facilitator, a thing that makes the real tool work better, with greater versatility. Drawing is a spline in Allen’s process, a crucial means towards painting. Just how crucial is perhaps reflected in Allen’s preference since 2001 of board to canvas. The hard, stable surface is like paper on a table top: no hidden crossbars to snag on and no weave to hinder the passage of the mark.
Spline is a word Allen knows although many others will not; he has used it in a title. And his titles are an element in themselves, although not necessarily of the paintings to which they are attached. With teasingly Richterian opacity, Allen coins titles that might – or might not – add a dimension. The viewer under speed with arcane scientific or computer terminology, comic-book lingo of thirty-plus years ago, or the more obscure shores of historical biography – a fair definition of most of the audience – will feel disadvantaged by this curious ellipsis, while enjoying none the less the sound, strangeness and verbal geometry of parenthesised clarifications around which the titles unwind.
Like Beezerspline. The playful tone in the first part of this compound noun or name and its nostalgic ring of childhood playground cries and pastimes will penetrate most age groups. The second part, the suffix, will probably remain uncoded; a slightly acidic, hissing tone in the head, the word looks made-up but is genuine. Of a sort. The most acute (and specialist) minds might hear in the full phrase the corruption of a French engineer’s curve formulation, the one that forms the common basis of computer graphics programs. Those who don’t have lost nothing of the image.
Ferreting out references can become tiresome, especially for modern audiences used to the ready gratification recurrent in popular culture. And it is not clear whether Allen means us to do it, or to frustrate our attempts at it. Although an eager chess player familiar with tactics and traps, Allen might simply devise peculiar titles for the fun in their creation were it not that words are suspect packages to an artist who admits to contending with a degree of word-blindness all his life.
Words need handling carefully. Because of his own compromised powers of verbal recognition, some words stay obstructively out of reach but fully formed. So Allen is intrigued that his visual script of forms just beyond meaning can lead others through a spectrum of interpretation. Just as there is no guarantee that he has not misspelt a word into its contorted essence, he is constantly surprised that his images are read back to him in metaphors that he had never imagined. His paintings are minefields of pictorial dyslexia.
Moreover, titles recur: Beezerspline reappears with (extended version) added, and (dark version) too. Like a comic genealogy, images are akin to near relatives of the original, but none is a copy. Allen, however, does ‘repeat’ paintings. Intrigued by how video pieces are editioned, he once wondered whether his paintings might try to defy the convention of a painted work being unique.
Yet while he repeats, he does not copy. Sizes vary between labelled versions, forms certainly evolve and colours change quite naturally from one to the next. Each has its own integrity, and although the artist’s tiredness with a motif might become apparent in varying levels of what he calls ‘skill’ as numbers multiply, these repetitions are really variations. The titles concede that fact, hence (gallery version), (studio version) and similar one-off titular embellishments that keep these pictorial cousins (several times removed) distinct.
In the way he works Allen demonstrates what he is thinking and it is carried into the viewer’s domain in a formidable fashion. Evident in his strategy of repeating pictures is an interest in notions of artistic ‘sincerity’ and the viability of the singular image. It places him outside many of his British contemporaries’ concerns and closer to those of older Dutch and Belgian artists like Luc Tuymans, Raoul de Keyser and René Daniëls. While Allen does not emulate Marcel Broodthaers’ Duchampian duel with the entanglements of art commerce – one in which Daniëls, an influence on Allen’s painterly spontaneity and control, was complicit – the broader argument that has relevance for him arose from their viewpoint about the value of the artist.
So, too, does his continental attitude towards a unified image. Asked if he would describe himself as an abstract or figurative painter, Allen replies that he is unsure. He does not consider his work as abstract, but suggests that these labels are just words: both are realistic in a way. The consistency of his motifs generates the image or, if you like, the major gestalt. Between top and tail bands of globular paint is a middle layer where hard-to-define queues of tapering planes, holding patterns of vacant speech balloons, strings of pompom fringes and cartoony cloud shapes radiate among their own shadows. Set against a modulating ground of mild luminosity (which some have seen as a wall and others as sky-, land- or dreamscape), the array is visually engaging and confusing too, just one of the simultaneities that Allen sets in train.
Paint in this section is not thick; in some places it is thin enough for priming to show through. Indeed, at a time when many other painters indulge the viscous fluidity of the medium, the material contrasts in Allen’s paintings are as striking as their ideogrammic uniformity. Above and below, the coiled mounds and sinuous threaded skeins of oil paint project up to four centimetres from the surface. Resembling Van Gogh’s starry night skies on steroids, these nodules of impasto are not easy on the onlooker. While the central image toys with a shallow illusion of space, the craggy fringe pushes beyond the edge into the solid fact of it.
These swirls might be the most challenging and time-consuming element for the artist, too. In an attempt to establish the right relationships of form, colour and mass Allen removes and switches them. Once set and the result varnished into lustre, the rest of the image flows in a comparatively straightforward fashion. But that point cannot be reached until this ungainly screen of oil is interposed between the viewer and the ‘real’ of the work. The accretions appear dumb, awkward and crudely basic, and it might be the chess player in Allen who ranges his pieces ritualistically at either end of the board. Advancing on to the chequered arena between is where one’s wits are really tested. The sequence of rehearsed moves and responses that lead to his surface becoming organised could be the elusive subject he once ached to find, the unifying principle.
In spite of their immediacy Allen’s paintings retain a distance. When he moves from working on paper into painting in oil, he ceases to feed off what he has drawn. Working straight on to a board (no palette is involved) his back is literally turned on the drawings. Instead photographs are more likely to occupy his field of vision. There is one of a wall in his last studio: it shows numerous drawings pinned to it. Another is a panoramic view of an exterior wall in
Since emerging from his postgraduate hangover with subject matter, Allen has preferred making to worrying about terms. He is consumed by the ritual in activity, the routine of the studio and with the next move on the chessboard of his career. Allen can paint, and does.
Introduction to LIMITS: Alighiero Boetti, Maria Chevska, Ellen Gallagher, Louise Hopkins, Andrew Mummery Gallery,
LIMITS
Alighiero Boetti, Maria Chevska, Ellen Gallgaher, Louise Hopkins
A collaboration conceived by Maria Chevska
“I think there is the right balance between ‘will’ and ‘limits’”, wrote Alighiero Boetti, “understood as the basic factor of our present life conditions: these two elements have the effect of neutralising each other, breaking off their ritual relationship in an organisational sense, and discovering undifferentiated matter.”
While this installation of work by four artists, of which Boetti is one alongside Maria Chevska, Ellen Gallagher and Louise Hopkins, tilts the balance in favour of will over limits, the place of “undifferentiated matter” remains in the domain of discovery. And because words play a significant part in the texture of everything on show here, sensitivity about definition must be observed. Each piece interprets “undifferentiated” in its own way, as “indiscriminate”, for instance, and “elementary”, even “uniform”. The “matter” cited by Boetti is, quintessentially, the empirical world of experience. It provides the formal and psychological key to the mental model that, informed by these compelling individual permutations, draws this quartet together over the passages (written and otherwise) of time, geography, culture and practice that separate them.
Limits emerges as a temporary collective. The artists’ shared “will” challenges the settled order to shun the prescriptive forces of traditional art generalisations. Materials more commonly immerse these makers in a poetry of possibilities than offer meaning. Consequently, they are likely to tackle the accumulated baggage associated with their sources, and render the machine-made intimately compelling. By using only what already exists publicly in the world, Louise Hopkins disrupts our expectations with charged activity. The newspapers, maps or music scores she has worked over, items formerly harbouring the possibility of sound in speech or song mouthed by the mind, are no longer repositories of opinion, narrative or information. They are reversed into harsh silence or the chaos of transformation; both require us to adjust our standpoint and assume an uneasy freedom to insert our own melodies, thoughts and stories.
The language that Maria Chevska fragments into her painting depicts the heated subjects of love, revolution and art. Two installations extend from opposite walls nearly to touch across the gallery floor in a flag-like form, as if spurned lovers had abandoned private correspondence for a semaphore of blackest punctuation. The language of this work is the language of the streets – of passion transmitted over distance and in battle, even – that debunks idealised romantic notions. By using their words, Chevska rehabilitates the activism of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Rosa Luxemburg. Brought in as fugitives from another time and place, their attitudes none the less gain fresh currency with Chevska’s sampling of phrases composed eighty years ago and more. They chime with a contemporary ring: “You mock me?” probes one work. This question is still loaded with vehemence and mutual incredulity: injected into current sectarian disputes – personal and public – it is pursued in the pages of newspapers, at street corners and through city centres emblazoned on placards.
Ellen Gallagher starts with what others have already discarded. A process of searching and finding in the pages of archaic ephemera is followed by scanning, printing, cutting and altering before organising into a kind of map or score of a possible tale or news story. Or into a collage resembling a ransom-note set out in blob-like shapes built into thick relief. As with
Alighiero Boetti also treated the complex with extreme simplicity and humour through the medium of the commonplace. And, like the other artists in Limits – for whom, in more than one sense, he was a forerunner – he aspired to capture the world. Because language is interwoven with life, the perceptual, oscillating flow of text provided his work with its collective relevance. Both “text” and “weave” have a common root in the Latin word textum, and in Afghan culture embroidery had the place occupied in the West by pen-written pages as living documents. Added to his propensity to re-write language in terms of systems and signs, Boetti’s adoption of non-European modes exemplified the artist’s fascination with permuting possibilities with which to express endless facets of everyday life, its mutability and mystery.
None of these artists has appropriated material in the sense commonly applied to recent art practices in this country and elsewhere. Nor is anything erased by reducing. Secondhand is, in fact, their route to new knowledge and by that token, their practical limits have been widened in order to re-invent, or to invent anew. Echoes of those former uses, none the less, still come through as the artists have intended that they should. They help to fire the electrical impulse of our own perceptive experience into the poetry of new work.
Text for Time Share: Jane Bustin & Alexis Harding, Emma Hill Fine Art/Eagle Gallery,
(Extended version in second and enlarged edition, September 2006)
Martin Holman
All or nothing at all
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aul Celan’s account of his own relentlessly self-scrutinising poetry has a relevance to the paintings of Jane Bustin and Alexis Harding.1 All three have worked close to the edge. For the two painters, that edge is not just the physical point at which the picture plane abuts the space around it. It is also the metaphorical edge where the actively communicative element – in the case of both artists, paint itself – meets the emotional or other-worldly verge. At that point occurs a kind of alchemical transformation, when the stuff of painting can be transmuted into another sensation.
For Celan that edge occurred when the conventions of poetry and the possibility offered by his roots in European symbolism and Jewish mysticism converged. This Romanian-born German pushed language until it ceded to silence, a condition almost contradictory of itself: either language fails in its attempt to explain (the limits of expression) or it acknowledges the articulacy of nothingness. On an immediate level, of course, both these painters push towards a similar point. One curves the surface around the lip of the support (as happens in Bustin’s practice) or towards a point of departure for the image itself (as in Harding). Yet while Bustin’s circumspect and conceivably reticent oils give the impression of being (in Celan’s phrase) ‘on the verge of falling silent’, it might appear strange to associate Harding’s tussling and dynamic paintings with silence. If this painter’s objects could make a noise, one imagines that sound would at least be like the creaking of glaciers or the groan of a scuppered ship as it sinks beneath the waves.
For in spite of appearing to occupy extremes on the visual and formal spectrums of abstract painting, these artists have more in common than, literally, meets the eye. Such a revelation was one value of the surprising and unpredictable pairing in the Eagle Gallery in summer 2005. It was also a reminder of the rickety nature of some categorisations in non-figurative art. Whereas Harding occupies the outwardly gestural and antagonistic position on the scale, Bustin demonstrates a more premeditated and scientific approach. Yet their work enters a conversation of sorts that is not purely the product of sharing one room at one time.
There is, I maintain, much that unites them, without blurring them into one misfit personality. They indisputably remain two distinct personalities: the work of one could never be confused with the output of the other. There are, none the less, formal crossing points. Both conceive of reality in an abstract way, for instance, and they contest traditional emblematic values in their use of compositional structures, specifically the grid and the bar or block. Neither device is easy: both resist alteration and enhancement, yet both painters tackle that precise problem. Harding makes the grid the source of the image’s renewal as well as the portal through which emotion and a suspicion of illusionism can enter the painting. Worked by Bustin, the field of colour can function as a channel to the senses that exist alongside sight in the human. What holds our attention is not figurative but a sensation infiltrated by the effects of colour and light.
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nother similarity is the division of images into fragments. In Harding’s work this process is more dramatic than in Bustin’s where surfaces touch, and may share the same support (but not always). A term to describe this arrangement is ‘diptych’. Although it properly denotes a hinged two-leaved or two–panelled object that closes like a book and forms a whole, it can stand for this union of two panels side-by-side in some form or other. Harding moves the principle forward by making two ‘panels’ from one source, and it is not too farfetched to view the resulting relationship between the support and its sloughed skin as a diptych, and one achieved by cunning painterly parthenogenesis. The two parts are one whole; there is a rhythm between them that allows us to trust in the integrity of the painting.
There is also a confluence of practice on a different plane, as these painters seem to play at a notion of nothingness. For Bustin, it offers a proposition to move away from, but a point of departure none the less of which she is very aware as it can also hold the prospect of return. Because ‘nothing’ is a fertile concept, Bustin has explored perceptions of blackness to test its traditional, linguistic and metaphorical associations with indistinctness, unintelligibility and worse. In a recent series of paintings made in response to the cognitive statements (of which one is a concerto for oboe) by a writer, a musician, a scientist and a sightless theologian, she reveals blackness – and black as a colour – as a field of infinite richness. She herself has sought the blackest black through the medium of yellow, red, blue and black, overlaying one upon another. As ‘perception’ means vision, she has examined its reflectiveness or (in the invention of Super Black, a chemically induced pigment) a black so black that it barely reflects light but seems to slip into another sense, becoming irresistibly tactile like the lure of velvet.2
In Harding’s work, nothingness might be the inevitable end-point towards which is directed the great effort he puts into painting. In many respects, this outcome highlights the dilemma of abstraction; it might even now define modernism itself. With the decade from 1985 their artistic nursery, both Bustin and Harding emerged as artists through the recriminations of postmodernism when a non-objective stance had to be justified against a prevailing attitude that unlike ‘new image’ figuration, non-objective work harboured suspicious recidivist behaviour. All of which, contentiously, might have contributed to abstract painters becoming more articulate with the material. In Harding’s case, one can never fully dispel the thought that the allusiveness of picture-making to actual events occupies one corner of the artist’s mind – both as an inspiration, but also as a target for trashing the whole idea. Although this idea can be taken only so far before Harding pulls the veil of imagery away from in front of our eyes to display the flaw in it, what comes to mind is painting which is natural, poetic and allusive as in a Petworth interior by Turner: economical of impressions, spontaneous and confident, and charged with feeling while remaining figuratively ambiguous.
‘Without depiction, without abstraction, the work is revealed as a document or record from this world,’ wrote fellow painter Jason Martin about his own work.3 The comparison with a close contemporary of Harding’s can be illuminating, especially as Martin does not deny the viewer the chance of forming associations from the fissures and sweeps that are set up by the trajectory of his body and arm from one edge of a painting to the other. But he refutes any claim to ‘a keyhole view of an illusionary world beyond’, an aspiration that I think Harding shares. Although with some disappointment at encountering the limited expression of his medium, Harding’s realism is concrete and knowable. ‘I feel the painting declares everything,’ he has stated, ‘the paintings are their titles.’ 4
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or this exhibition, Harding chose to work in the gallery on three large-scale paintings and a number of small panels. All belonged to the location although not all were begun there: his technique places inevitable constraints on producing new paintings in situ in the time at his disposal. None the less, the move to this impromptu studio was a bold step by an artist wedded to his own workplace and reliant on some routines that have grown up there. The introduction of new risk therefore augmented his interest in how each painting would alter and change.
Typical of his interest in the materiality of the medium, Harding allowed paint to behave naturally according to its own properties. His established practice involves tracing a grid of household gloss emulsion over a dense field of wet oil pigment by passing twice over the surface a length of guttering perforated to let the paint run through. The artist is then on hand to respond to or deny the natural inclination of two substances, incompatible in drying time and chemical composition, to shift, part and slide with time. An object emerges from the industrious passage of activity by the stuff itself, and by the artist’s decisions to intervene or leave alone. Whether on the flat, resting on trestles, or raised at increasing gradients, paint is drawn off, gathered by hand, exposed to the pull of gravity and lanced into a surface that gives up a record of itself.
During this miniature residency, the artist observed: ‘When you put something down (like paint on a surface), why should you expect it to be there when you return?’ Significant in this comment is Harding’s wish to relax his characteristic vigilance in order to face that very possibility. By trusting more to paint’s performance within the strictures he had set (of scale, density and mix of elements), Harding was altering perceptibly the nature of his decisions, dealing more with his actions in advance. Like a tourist abroad who feels untethered from the rituals of home, perhaps he could act differently in these foreign surroundings? Was it to be the painterly equivalent of a British stag party in
‘This is the first time,’ Harding had explained beforehand, ‘that the paintings will really be allowed to “lose it”, not to be stopped, to make themselves and then destroy themselves. In this movement … another image will emerge.’ Like Bustin’s, his work is the product of immense concentration and the exertion of some kind of force. In Bustin’s case, that force is more ethereal; with Harding, it takes a physical form. It is sensed in the way movement has hitherto been frozen in relation to the idea of each piece, allowed to move so far and no farther. On this occasion, the boundaries were deliberately widened to permit transgression from wall to floor. Through the agency of gravity primarily, but with the artist looking for that moment when one layer will liberate itself as the support is tilted, one image was set adrift like a burial at sea. As one mobile matter confronted the static floor so the rhythm of the surface was played out afresh under foot. The action ruptured the painting but preserved the whole, and while not unprecedented in the history of art, it set up a different negotiation than we have come to expect: between the object and the viewer’s eye and body.
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ustin also uses action to bring about an outcome. Like Harding, the result can often surprise her although her method grows more out of conscious prediction, measurement and calibration. The concentrated distillation that accompanies working has not precluded departing from the traditional relationship of painting with the wall. But her use of blocks in the late 1990s was no less radical than Harding’s experiments here. Her two paintings in this exhibition were made in her east
Ossulton Way, Hampstead Garden Suburb exemplifies Bustin’s practice of distilling sensations into the effects of her materials, locating in them that quality that occupies our attention in, say, a great Renaissance painting. Consequently, the bands of colour and texture derived from aluminium, silk, gesso, implicate our encounter with a passage of experience conveyed with no easy certainty. A passage in A la recherche du temps perdu, where Proust describes passing three trees, has a resonance for Bustin in this regard: ‘I gazed at three trees, which I could see clearly; but my mind suspected they hid something on which it could have no purchase… I watched the trees as they disappeared, waving at me in despair and seeming to say, “Whatever you fail to learn from us today you will never learn. If you let us fall by this wayside where we stood striving to reach you, a whole part of your self that we brought for you will return forever to nothing.” …When the carriage went around a corner… I was sad as though I had just lost a friend or felt something die in myself, as though I had broken a promise to a dead man or failed to recognise a god.’5
What is striking is the impact on both artists of architecture. For Bustin, while the fundamental structure of a painting has an affinity with building in terms of order, symmetry and tectonic construction (the layering), the allusion to the overall built environment is equally strong. The broad vibrancy of the two paintings in this exhibition was due in part to a filtration of sensations absorbed by the artist between two distinct locations – the neat boundaries and blossomed avenues of a garden suburb and the freely transgressed frontiers and dirty-edged colours redolent of the turbulent inner city. The aluminium and oil parts of the
That Bustin responded to this dynamic and fluid conception of a building, one that allows people to expect more of the spaces they are given, points to the dichotomy in her outlook between order and its opposite. Harding knew Bustin’s contribution before he completed his new paintings, and his response was intelligent, sensitive and surprising. Libeskind has written that the ‘magic of architecture… is always already floating, rising, flying, breathing’, and perhaps unconsciously, Harding pursued that notion with his most ambitious new work; moreover, the largest piece, 300 centimetres in length, was constructed on aluminium. The painter used the physical space of the room to break down and extend the tenets of his own practice.6 The stride taken in resting the top edge of 26 June,
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nherent in both artists’ work is a dependence on and manipulation of time - in the process of making and, perhaps most importantly, in how the work is received through the eye
and body by the mind. Time is defined as duration, as continued existence, and as progress. In one sense, the concentration by both painters on process and making is life-affirming: it announces ‘I am alive’. Time is also a restriction, however, and ‘control’ is a word used by both artists when I have spoken to them. Each employs a compositional device that objectifies painting; and both devices are derived from a base that is rational and programmatic. Harding is conscious of the appeal of ‘being in and out of control as a person’; his choice of synthetic colours, discarded tones and computer-made hues that can jangle on the optic nerve are indicators of this recalcitrant, edgy personality in his work. The most significant sign, however, is the visual evidence he supplies the visitor of the instability of the image, a sensation that outlasts the notion of ‘finish’ associated with a gallery setting. Through analogy Harding owns up to the humanistic parallels inherent in paintings that ditch the emotional aridity of which Minimalism’s commentators spoke positively. But his work also addresses compellingly the issue of the organisation of the image, a central tenet of modernist abstraction.
Bustin, by contrast, presents the near-antithesis of Harding’s attitude. While he contends with materiality, the visual field in her paintings hovers between dissolution and substantiation. Coaxing communication by consistently working and reworking set patterns, she mixes and brushes paint into a contained structure that disowns disruption. Yet tension is apparent between the disconcertingly ordered idyll that she perceives - in the garden suburb she lives in, for instance, and maybe in her own practice, too - and the exciting madness and frenetic street scene of the
As the outcomes of both artists are similarly intense, they almost occupy two halves of a diptych where each panel is equally the foil (physical to the other’s spiritual) and the complement (vision in one is directed inward while other looks outward). As Bustin herself pointed out to me, there is a sense that one starts where the other finishes, and each stirs up the undertow glimpsed swirling in the other.
A version of this essay appeared in gallery notes for the exhibition TIME SHARE, 30 June−5 August 2005
1 See Paul Celan, Collected Prose, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop, Carcanet Press,
2 Super Black has been developed by the National Physical Laboratory in Middlesex. It is an ultra-black, very low reflectance coating for use with optical instruments. Because it can efficiently reduce and absorb stray light within an instrument, it is also used as a radiation detector.
3 Quotes from Jason Martin come from About Vision (exhibition catalogue),
4 All quotes from the artists come from conversations and correspondence with the author, July 2005.
5 Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu.
6 Studio Daniel Libeskind website.
Jane Bustin is represented by Emma Hill Fine Art Eagle Gallery • Alexis Harding is represented by Andrew Mummery Gallery