The gallery is empty apart from an ironing board: a fairly ordinary, everyday sort of ironing board, fabric-covered with the usual ‘x’-shaped legs, and a metal grid on which to place the hot iron. But there is no iron. Instead, the ironing board bears the weight of half a ton of Kilkenny stone. The semi-polished dark grey block soars up towards the ceiling of the Anthony Reynolds Gallery, like the upturned bow of Charon’s barque, ferrying its cargo of souls – Duchamp, Magritte and Joseph Kosuth – across the river syntax to the dark land of metaphor.
Despite its apparent simplicity, Golem,
Amikam Toren’s most recent work, is probably his most complex: at once a
hypnagogic image which leapt fully formed into the artist’s mind, declaring
‘I am Golem!’ and a lucid encapsulation of the central concerns of his work
over the past 35 years. In Hebrew mythology the Golem was a man created from
clay and brought to life to protect villagers from outside invaders. It had
no soul or mind as such, and in many ways may be seen as the precursor not
only to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein but also to the twentieth-century
concept of the robot. Even the simplest of domestic aids may be subsumed
under the rubric of ‘robot’, and an ironing board is a wonderfully
attenuated example of this trope.
The vertigo, dizziness and sheer metaphysical collywobbles induced by
standing close to Golem speaks eloquently of the almost palpable power of
this precarious confrontation of the absurd with the sublime. The potential
danger of its collapse is only subverted by the sure knowledge that it is
impossible for it to exist. Toren is constantly raising the most serious of
questions concerning art, reality and the everyday, and then eliding the
question with another question which is the answer. Where we expect the
solemn, in quiet genuflection to the deities of deconstruction – Derrida,
Duchamp and Baudrillard – we find instead the theoretical rug being pulled
from under our feet by the searing wit of a visual and material conundrum,
which, in this case, leaves even a certain over-theorised, upside-down
bicycle wheel mounted on a stool literally standing.
For no good reason we trust our eyes: the ironing board is, of course, a one-off, fabricated from high-tensile welded steel, constructed so that it can just hold the weight of the stone; and the stone itself is hollowed out. But just as knowing the material facts which lie behind Toren’s other work does not confound their philosophical and visual impact, so too being shown how the ‘trick’ is done with Golem does not undermine its power as a post-surrealist object, one that is simultaneously Duchamp’s bicycle wheel, Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe and Lautréamont’s ‘fortuitous meeting, on a dissection table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella’.
Toren works in extended series, sometimes spanning decades, in order to encompass every possible permutation of a particular ‘experiment’, unlike the production of so much contemporary art for the satiety of the market. What if one were to make a painting using nothing but a painting? It is no use to leave the canvas as it is, this has been done before, and testifies not so much to the laziness of the artist as to the theoretical framework which rushes up to scaffold the gesture. The Pidgin Paintings series was begun in 1986 and is still in progress. Stretching up a large canvas and then slicing out huge swaths of the fabric, Toren then proceeds to pulp the resulting material, mix it with a clear binder, and apply it as ‘paint’ to the remainder of the canvas. We have here a perfect trope of the ultimate self-reflexive painting: a painting that is a painting made from a painting, of a painting; ultimately a picture of its own creation. By exposing the stretcher and the wall behind, in the process of obtaining the material to manufacture the ‘paint’, the painting is made at the same time more ‘real’ as an object, and yet weaker as a ‘painting’. The penetration of the surface of the canvas brings to mind Fontana and his signature ‘slash’ paintings, but whereas Fontana was concerned with now archaic ideas of beauty and destruction, ‘breaking through to a new dimension’, Toren is interested in the concretisation of the theoretical; not illustrating theory, but making theory active through a singular, revelatory praxis of process and material.
The Armchair Paintings is another series of work in which the artist breaches the taut sanctity of the stretched canvas. Bad art is Matisse’s fault; it all started when he uttered that rallying call to the bourgeois instinct of the budding Sunday painter: ‘What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or disturbing subject matter ... like a comforting influence, a mental balm – something like a good armchair in which one rests from physical fatigue’. With these words he gave birth to a whole new sub-genre of art: paintings that ‘look like art’ but are definitely not, to be found in every junk shop in every city and hanging on park railings for all the world like hand-painted, pictorial metonyms for ‘Keep off the Grass’ signs. Toren retrieves these déclassé pictures, with their smug, self-satisfied assurance that they are ‘real art’ and slices mercilessly into the integument of their banality, ‘removing’ words the better to make them manifest. Words and phrases such as ‘no bill sticking’ (into an icky nude); ‘sharon I shall wait forever’ (into a solo boat afloat on a melancholic lake); ‘attention please’ (a parade of upstanding jugs in a sub-Morandi still-life); and ‘ultimately propaganda’ (a thistly Scottish glen). Not only does the text – variously gleaned from graffiti, aphorisms, idioms, street posters, public notices, and such like – interact with the paintings at the level of an ironic, linguistic joust (the spectre of Magritte’s La clef des songes of 1935 hovers close), but the very genre of Matissian ‘armchair painting’ is recovered, reconstructed and subverted to Toren’s own end, which is nothing less than to critique, through material practice, the very nature of representation, reality, materiality, and the everyday.
A key series began in 1979-80 with Neither a Painting nor a Chair. Here Toren deals with the problematics of representation head-on. A humble wooden chair – is it van Gogh’s or Kosuth’s? – was whittled away until all that remained was, literally, a skeleton. The resulting sawdust was then mixed with a clear medium to form his characteristic ‘not paint’-paint and was used to make ten paintings of the chair, the last three of which used ‘paint’ made from the ashes of three unsuccessful paintings which were burnt. The skeleton chair and the ten paintings were exhibited together as an installation. Going back to Kosuth’s 1965-67 One and Three Chairs – a real chair exhibited with a life-size photograph of the chair and its dictionary definition – we can see that Toren has taken this key work forward by questioning the state-hood of the object, deconstructing its quiddity as ‘chair’ and seeding it into a representation of itself. Which is more ‘really’ the chair? Is it the remaining skeleton or the representation made from the substance of the chair, which at least has the advantage of ‘looking’ like a chair? In fact, in the process, readymade and object have been smuggled into art under cover of the artist’s paradoxical praxis; not by contextualisation, appropriation, or any of the other familiar strategies of late-Modernism, but by an act of ‘labour’ which in its sublime absurdity lies outside of craft, inside of art, and around a metaphysics of representation.
Israeli-born Toren has been exhibiting internationally for over 35 years – he is now 57 years old – and has had solo exhibitions in the UK at major public galleries (the Serpentine, the ICA, Ikon and the Arnolfini), and showed at the Venice Biennale in 1984. Nominated for the John Moores in 1987, he was a prize winner in both 1989 and 1999. His work has been a marked influence on a whole generation of British artists who came to prominence in the late eighties and early nineties, such as Ceal Floyer and Angela de la Cruz, and those whose work engaged with the post-Duchampian everyday and the problematics of representation, from Marc Quinn’s head made from a frozen cast of the artist’s own blood and Jenny Saville’s text-inscribed nudes to Hadrian Piggott’s inverted sinks made from cast soap. Given his status and stature as an artist, his maturity, influence and importance, not only for the national, but also the international art world, could it be more than oversight that he is not represented in the Tate collection of contemporary British art, a collection that purports to be comprehensive and representative of the most important art produced in this country?
Richard Dyer is the News Editor for contemporary, Assistant Editor of Third Text, Managing Editor of Wasafiri, and a freelance art critic and writer