On a
recent visit to the BALTIC in Gateshead, someone pointed out that there was
a ‘shed aesthetic’ going on. Phyllida Barlow’s precarious constructions,
Veli Granö and Tuovi Hippelainen’s rickety railway and corrugated iron
cinema and Bob and Roberta Smith’s forest of signs with a central
outhouse-like structure certainly seemed perilously home-made. It was as
though, throughout the tall building perched on the banks of the Tyne,
gravity threatened like a hanging sword.
There is a lot of sculpture that, rather than striving for a stable
manufactured aesthetic, takes up a position on the verge of collapse. You
might say that this state of potential failure emphasises a universal
antagonism between our urge to control matter and gravity’s pulling power;
it is emblematic of the pitching of human wits against the vicissitudes of
nature. You might also say that this tendency in sculpture is painterly,
that it represents an expressionistic materiality, an impulse to introduce
ambiguity into physical presence or symbolic systems.
The winner of this year’s John Moores Painting Prize was, uncommonly for a
painting, also affected by gravity. Alexis Harding’s Slump/Fear
(orange/black) (2004) was a coagulation of paint that oozed gradually
downwards, threatening to eventually abandon the canvas altogether for the
floor. The surface has been painted with a grid which, when distorted by the
migrating paint, lends the painting a sculptural presence, like a modelled
landscape.
Slump/Fear (orange/black) signals a very twentieth-century connection
between painting and the event. It is the moment at which the canvas itself
becomes the register of reality to be considered, rather than the illusory
space depicted upon it; when the represented is usurped by the actual. Ever
since Pollock, the process of painting has been acknowledged as performative
and the painting itself as residual, although in most cases this is rarely
born out – the painting, rather than the process, nearly always emerges as
the site of the art eventually. But in theory, the object might be secondary
or a documentary artefact of an action; the painting is flagged up as
painted, as past tense, as evidence.
Harding’s moving paint, then, could be a literal extrapolation of this
phenomenon. The prolonged event extends beyond the performative actions of
the artist into the collapsing of the pigment. Harding’s paint is an update
of Bas Jan Ader tumbling off the roof of his house. Ader was forever falling
off things – dramatising the point at which the human subject becomes an
object under the influence of natural forces, the point at which the artist
switches from conscious person to passive object or, in short, the
transition from artist to artwork. The main difference is, however, that
Ader presented the captured moment through photography or film, whereas
Harding’s gravitating painting is a live moment, seeping ever downwards.
Ader’s practice was often mechanically repetitive – something which
Harding’s organic movement can never be. A piece by Ader – I’m too sad to
tell you (1971), for instance, when the artist cried to camera – might
appear as a film, a postcard and a series of photographs. This strategy
could only reaffirm the transformation of the artist from subject with
interiority to object with exteriority, or from the individual to a
typification of the artist. In Pitfall on the Way to a New Neo-Plasticism,
Westkapelle, Holland (1971), a series of four photographs, we see Ader lying
prone on an empty roadway; then he is lying on a blue blanket, then
clutching a yellow petrol tank, then with a red plank, of sorts, tucked
under his knee. The final image is an approximation of a classic Mondrian
geometric painting, with Ader’s limbs and torso standing in for the
structural black lines. This is a performance of a bricollage of a painting
– a temporary convergence of painterly sculpture, performative painting and
photographic evidence.
Through their ironic submission to gravity, both Ader and Harding replace a
moment of true collapse with a fictional or manufactured one, pre-empting
nature, as it were. Baudelaire writes, in The Essence of Laughter (1855):
‘It is not the victim of the fall who laughs at his own misfortune, unless,
that is, he happens to be a philosopher, in other words, a being who, as the
result of a long habit, has acquired the power rapidly to become two persons
at one and the same time, and can bring to bear on what happens to himself
the disinterested curiosity of a spectator.’ In his essay ‘The Rhetoric of
Temporality’ (1969) Paul de Man extends Baudelaire’s notions of
self-watching: ‘The Fall, in the literal as well as the theological sense,
reminds him [the artistic or philosophical man] of the purely instrumental,
reified character of his relationship to nature ...’
For those of us to whom the instantaneous bifurcation of the self into our
authentic selves and a cool spectator does not come easy, a fall is more
usually followed by embarrassment – the knee-jerk reaction to being overcome
by gravity or the call of nature. Psychology textbooks outline how, in
social situations, we attempt to control images of self before real or
imagined audiences. Social anxiety occurs either because we doubt that we
will be able to convey the image we would wish, or because an event occurs
which prevents us from so doing. This sounds very similar to Baudelaire’s
replication of the self into the self-watching and the oblivious selves, the
real and the fictional, the victorious and the victim. The literature
distinguishing shame from embarrassment also outlines a discrepancy between
two perceived states. Sociologist Andre Modigliani describes how: ‘In common
usage one is primarily ashamed of oneself, while one is primarily
embarrassed about one’s presented self. This may mean that shame is the more
personal extension of embarrassment, or it may mean that it is a quite
distinct psychological state.’ So embarrassment, while involving the
discrepant self-image present in shame, involves in addition the exposure of
this discrepancy to the scrutiny of others – a fundamental characteristic of
much performance art.
In a conference on risk and performativity at the ICA, London, in 1994, Tim
Etchells, of Forced Entertainment, delivered (albeit by video) a personal
provocation, ‘On Risk and Investment’:
‘... Investment links to passion, politics and rage. It slips out in
laughter, numbness, silence. Investment happens when we’re hitting new
ground, when we don’t quite know, where we can’t quite say, where we feel
compromised, complicit, bound up, without recourse to an easy position. This
is not the place for respectable or soap-box certainties – only live issues
will do. Investment wants us naked, with slips and weaknesses, with the
not-yet and never-to-be certain, and all that’s in the process, in flux,
with all that isn’t finished, with all that’s unclear and therefore needs to
be worked out. Don’t give me anything less than this. Don’t give me a truth
that’s more fixed, i.e., more of a stupid lie [...] Investment comes when
we’re beaten so complex and so personal that we move beyond rhetorics into
events ...’
Etchells’s ‘live issues’ generally implies the presence of the human body;
his use of the word ‘naked’, too, can be applied literally to much
performance art; ‘the not-yet and never-to-be certain’ suggests a temporal
unfolding, an unscripted narrative. The body as a site for an examination of
risk and the discrepancy between self-image and self-projection is a strong
tendency in performance work, but it is much more difficult to understand
how this vulnerability might be achieved in painting. It may seem spurious
to draw a parallel between Gina Pane’s self-mutilating performances and
Fontana’s pierced and slashed canvases, yet the bloodied skin and violated
paint nonetheless indicate an appraisal of mortality. Fontana’s black
infinity beyond the canvas and Pane’s bloody indication of human finiteness
seem like the diametrically opposed a priori of nature: the apparent
endlessness of time and the certainty of death.
So, if we follow this performative path, we find a nice linguistic loop: we
say we are mortified when we are embarrassed. How, though, can contemporary
painting reflect this vulnerability? Can there be so much at stake? Beyond
the literal collapse of Harding’s paint, the bricollage of Ader’s Mondrian
pastiche and the three-dimensional peril of rickety sculpture, can there be
a parallel peril in illusory imagery? Etchells’s call for the artist to be
‘... compromised, complicit, bound up, without recourse to an easy position’
can surely be answered in the realm of representation, but perhaps the
mediated nature of painting cannot provide the immediacy required of
embarrassment. Perhaps painting’s conflation of the imaginary and the real
roots it firmly in rhetorics and not in events. Perhaps its status as
evidence of action means that it is always too late.
Sally O’Reilly is a writer and critic, and Trivia Editor
for contemporary