Digi-Snaps: Let's Keep The Crap Ones.

 

 It seems to go like this:

 

The fading of printed photographs, those temporary slowing downs of the material  decay of things pictured, is an inevitable process. But, when considering the digitally reproducible, now incapable of attaching itself to a printed object this process of decay has become internalised by viewers and attached itself to the fungoid puffballs of our brains.

 

Like a William Burroughs mutating virus it has sneakily morphed into an unavoidable neurological condition. That of an atrophying physiological capacity to retain and store information, begrudgingly accepted by greedily addicted consumers of tsunamis of semi-random visual stuff.

 

And it is true that, rather than a parade of revealed truths, the profound and profane shallowness of vast quantities of moments and events pictured leaves the brains memory muscles weaker and less efficiently pliable.

 

Additionally, the whole procedure leaves an uncomfortable residue, the feeling that some unknowable external force has wiped its arse on the eyeballs.

 

Although it may leave a hazy cataract of stupidity clouding any selective filtration between hungry eye and passive brain this ocular coprophilia is infuriatingly addictive. Largely because the warm porridge of digi-snaps we mutually bathe in also acts as a sustaining social glue, a binding of bewildered status monkeys into something like a community.

 

However, if the unexamined life is not really worth living we all have a suspicion that the purely self-examined life is one never lived.

 

The reality is that most people toss their pennyworth of pictorial fun into a sea of images then register its efficiency by the ripples it makes. Is it reposted, rejigged, bastardised, recontextualised, generally pissed about with? And, more significantly, how often?

 

This could be claimed to be the case with any analog anchoring of forms in an old photograph. As an idea and as an object photographs have always spoken to, abutted and overlaid all other things which qualify as a photograph.

 

But now the process of production has accelerated to the point that their ghostly contemporary equivalents no longer stay still long enough to actually be looked at. The juddering informational flow of could-be photographs then bobs around in fat billowy invisible clouds waiting to be mined by aesthetes and commerce.

 

Intriguingly it may be that the human brain operates in a similarly arbitrary way, collecting a chain of momentary snapshots of the environments its associated body traipses through, then editing the compiled photo album later on. The concept of flow is one thing, our sensory capacity to experience it seamlessly may be something we delude ourselves into believing.

 

Now that various apps will edit down any backlog of randomly triggered and unseen images, then upload the ‘best quality’ ones for you the next logical development is to step away from any hands-on engagement with the process entirely.

 

Make a collage instead. After all there’s plenty of free material available through the internet. But let’s make sure the crap pictures have a secure future.

It may take a few hundred years to get around to looking at them. By then, they’ll look a lot more interesting than the buffed, polished and sharpened ones. And, hopefully, appear as gloriously heavy and untranslatable static snagging up the cogs of whatever mechanism tries to mangle them into passive inconsequentiality.

Louise Giovanelli

Manchester Art Gallery (Manchester, UK) is temporarily home to a new body of paintings by Louise Giovanelli supplemented by her selection of three Renaissance panels, including, from the gallery collection, a crucifixion from the school of Buoninsegna di Duccio and works from Victor Man and Mark Manders.

Her practice pivots on ‘the tension between representation  and materiality, and the relationship between contemporary and historic painting.’(1) 

Actually most contemporary painting does this. It’s probably more accurate to state that Giovanelli’s modus operandi is to reassert, and, in fact, consciously maintain, the tension between the physically substantial and the elusive febrile twitchiness of contemporary images potential for fluidity, their easily unanchored transferability and temporary there-ness. 

Giovanelli also has a liking of both the physical intimacy of artisanal engagement with surface and the bullish certainties of architectural space. So Duccio's 'Transfiguration' (1307 - 11) and the aforementioned 'Crucifixion' (1315 - 30) show the time worn delicacy of a gold leaf surface and scuffed brown frame contained within a protective framing box. The religious imagery shows a clumsy but strangely sophisticated spatial hovering of figures asserting the solidity of the painting whilst alluding to the transcendent aspirations of the works. 

However, Giovanelli proceeds by highlighting the facts that, by necessity, all painting indulges a conceptual obfuscation: misting over its failure to force forms to congeal into the cohesive bulk of an object and the knowledge that the tangible can only become legible through introspection.  A process analogous to a spatial withdrawal from experiential encounter with surface qualities, a slow calibrated disconnection from haptic interface with materiality, to allow oneself to build meaning from the experience. 

So, images emerge from a surface chaos of materials but they require a physical distance before being perceived. However, they only really become productively functional when residing within or in front of their founding materials. They are contrarily tied to their material ground and present only when denying their material grounding - the images are actually present by being perceived as existing at spatially impossible points. apparently pressed into the surface and simultaneously hanging like a sheet of visual information projected onto surface.

A seductive clutter of areas of decorative repetition, wallpaper, vegetation, clothing and textile patterns infect any number of paintings, a restrained anarchy of curves and marks reminding viewers of the surface illusion of the medium itself. Giovanelli has a particular liking of the fat curves and splayed repetitions of the acanthus leaf and 'abstracts' its shapes into a number of velvet-blue and inky-blue oil paintings. The motif is present in the rich green background of a Victor Man portrait from 2015. Giovanellis use of the forms are presented like close-ups of a bunched layering of acanthus leaves; this presentation of layering as a constructive process is most effective with 'An Ex V' which has additional drawn cut marks of heavy blue, almost calligraphic in their controlled curvatures, which slice through the optical compression of layers.

Another recurrent editing or cropping of image within the artists work is the horizontal bisecting of the ovoid of the human head below the eye-line, an enforced realignment of viewers visual focus towards the mute mouth of the half portraits and their fleshy expanses of throat and neck. 

This personalised trope is employed in the bleached grainy pink-red heads of 'Billyo V' and 'Billyo VI'. Whilst previous exhibitions have seen Giovanelli using seams and edgings of lace as emphasised points of differentiation between clothing and flesh, between tones of materiality, here milky washes veil the concrete certainties of form. 

The half heads of these paintings appear to be picturings of a section of a sculpted figure prone in a sleeping position. Like 'Para' there seems to be an allusion to a digital transcriptive fixing of the solid forms, the addition of a bright narrow framing bands of colour on a number of paintings often tonally indicating the mechanical coldness of photographic media.

This editing device is also represented here with the three paintings 'Marker V', 'Marker VI' and 'Marker VII' a repeated cropped image, the top and bottom line of the cropping slightly varies giving a degree of additional information when all three are mentally overlaid to a final image. Each rendering has a subtly different degree of lightening or bleaching of the source picture and each carry a fluid horizontal line which cuts across the throat. Each rendering has a marking of two short parallel vertical lines on the neck which are hard to interpret. They are strong and rather lovely pastel coloured paintings with a suggestion of the necessary violence done when dissecting source materials.

The synthetic smoothness of the rendering of skin gives the paintings a second or even third-hand distance from the regular whorls, bruises, marks and impurities of real human skin - the paintings actually suggest quotations of, or echoes of, earlier examples of pictorial intimations of flesh. 

Giovanelli's interest in the history of the medium is slyly very much a concern with its acknowledgement and apprehension through digital media, or rather its contemporary perception as mediated through academia, images in books and the now ubiquitous digital media.

The dematerialisation of painting as tangible thing. its reduction to image-fact which has peeled away from its material grounding changes the pace of its address by the on-looker or viewer.

The 'Marker' paintings are really an additional show infiltrating the larger exhibition. They are shown on different walls but impossible not to be perceived as one work in three locations: a restaging of Giovanelli's impulse to use the architectural layout and surfaces of a display space, a recolonizing of galleries and display spaces with rectangles of painted surfaces allowing her to take back a degree of control over the pace of viewing, the speed at which a visitor can address the material fact of the component units which jigsaw into the final exhibition.

The formative context of gallery and its inseparability from the institutional action of constructing a viewing subject is being hijacked into her practice. Ostensibly a productive deathliness or constraining limbo, contrary to times movements as a thing felt,  it is strategically employed to congeal narrative flows authoritative certainties.

Giovanelli may enjoy the impenetrable fact of a paintings presence but she also recognises the rich potential of absence. 

By using the relative blankness of areas of wall, time stretches between the painted panels and any definitive 'meaning' dumbly hangs in the dead air of the vertical surfaces between the panels.

Ultimately Giovanelli likes the painting-object to operate with the same knotty compression of intentions exhibited in literature. The eloquence of anonymity, the historical function of justifying established social hierarchies with painted images; such things may be thematically present but never at the expense of a broader obsession with making clear the essentially conceptual alchemy of balancing material solidity with the feral slipperiness of imagery as meaning generators. 

1.    ‘Louise Giovanelli - In Conversation’ -  Anomie Publishing (2017)

                                      ‘Rituals Of Looking’ (pages 6 - 11)

                                             - Charlotte Keenan McDonald (page 7)

                                       Edited by Linda Pittwood and Guy Tindale

                                                        ISBN: 978 - 1 - 910221 - 13 - 6

Joe Devlin: 'Gatefolds.'

 
                             

                              

Joe Devlin’s work has historically centred on copying, transcribing or somehow reusing the stains, interventions and scribbled marginalia that borrowers have left peppering the pages of library books.

His Todmorden-based exhibition ‘Gatefolds’ is at a slight variance from his usual productive theft. Here Devlin has lifted a page of simple line drawings recording the different structural designs of farm gates, probably from a 1930s book. All twelve designs have bold no nonsense regional names: ‘Pembroke’, ‘Montgomery’, ‘Cumberland’, and so on.

Devlin’s page compiling these appropriated reductive drawings are blankly neutral presentations indicating these hinged structures; hard delineations of the operationally active which are themselves mechanical reactions to any compulsion to expressively map with the tools of drawing.

Acting as retreating markers between the mucky black sky-mirroring  puddles, the crusting cow-pats, the bumps and contours which coat rough horizontal rectangles of field and ground; the organizing frameworks of gates map the pastoral landscape.

The thick black lines framing blocks of white paper suggest drably functional pieces of landscape furniture, ones designed to either regulate, or at least to slow the pace of, independent movement But they also act as guides for the viewing eye to trace the hermetically sealed linear structures bounded by its framing horizontal oblong format.

In a further act of physical transcription the linear designs have been re-presented as small aluminium-silver freestanding, shelf-bound sculptural works. Miniature Modernist inflected rectangles with the beginnings of gentle, Origami folds dictated by the vertical and diagonal lines of the source diagrams which have then been photographed, the photographs layered in a pile in the corner of the studio. A potential book-in-waiting.

A simplistic reading of the show could assume that the territorial musings of a confused mid-Brexit UK are somehow being alluded to by an ‘appropriation’ of regional variations in directive field furniture. This is, however, an intentional comedic act of misdirection. 

The real substance of the exercise is both much simpler and considerably more complex. The literalness of the lurching moments of transcription folds back on themselves, from deformation of the authority of the original taxonomy of regional gates to their productive reimaginings as ‘art-objects’ which then, via photography, head back to the flat universe of images and their inevitable supporting text.

Even if they detour through rigid and legible formal structurings - the written word, sculptures shapes and depths, photography’s ‘indexicality’ and digital shiftiness - the meandering and interweaving functions of author, reader, viewer and producer are the actual constants. The assumed authority of an  originating authorship is the slyly targeted centre of the artist’s criticism, even if this includes undermining the primary importance of artists themselves in the whole interpretive game.

Chester Tenneson: 'Half Of Two Days Of Everything'.

In Salford's Paradise Works, Chester Tenneson's exhibition 'Half Of Two Days Of Everything' mixes sculptures formed from collisions of accrued kitsch objects with examples of the more widely exhibited text and signage pieces. 

Titles seem to be lifted from literature and the lyrics of pop songs; all in the service of mining popular culture to construct physical incarnations of moments of poetic sarcasm.

Tenneson has a preference for the high-fidelity banality of functional objects with a plasticised shouty-ness, everyday things as heightened visual events nodding towards the distancing paradigm of digital purity. They are objects that aspire to the cheeky inconsequentiality of flat and decorative signage.

The largest pieces are floor-bound combinations of functional items and cartoony toy items echoing blandly useful things. So 'Out Here On The Mountain Top' (2018) is a square art packing case topped by a miniature but not insubstantial black umbrella, open and, impossibly, standing up by the curved handle resting on the wooden surface. 'You're Like An Automatic" (2019) has a handful of wavy plastic chips spooning each other in the curved indentation of a polystyrene brick's surface. 'More, More, More' (2018) uses three trainers as snug bases for three fatly inflated inflatable walking sticks; their curving handles grumpily facing away from each other. 

The best of these works is 'The Victory Cry' (2019); a table tennis net raised from the ground at each end of its length by aluminium-silver cleaning stanchions, its horizontal sag emphasized by a weighting square of sticking plaster. It sulkily radiates the prosaic inevitability of a predictable British Wimbledon defeat.

The smaller sculptural collisions presented on a line of white shelves are more immediately like-able but stick in the grey matter less successfully. The exception being 'Ashes to Ashes' (2018) in which a lumpy ash grey arch of an aquarium rock and a horizontal plastic cigarette bring to mind a pissed golem on a fag break.

Tenneson's confident use of the volume of real space has been ratcheted up further by hijacking Paradise Works projection and digital image playback space as an almost blacked out installation. A short line of cinema seats face a floor grounded light-box announcing 'A PAUSE', the restful break time from opening night socialising undercut by the regular sonic irritant of a clacking metronome.

Even here the space of the room is formally restructured as a series of flat theatrical layerings and positionings of viewer and information-object.

Cognisant of the retreating vagueness of object-biased culture Tenneson seems to enjoy taking pre-fabricated things for a wander back into the arena of flattened signs; that is to say literal, functional popular signage. This adds a tragicomic incorrectness to proceedings and yet, far from nonsense, the works themselves radiate an ironclad logic; one which is, however, hard to re-articulate outside the idiot slap of the visual.  

The flatter text on board paintings of 'HALF OF TWO DAYS OF EVERYTHING' (2019) and fourteen part 'Birds never look into the sun (Social media paintings)' (2018 - 19) have the visual punch of informational signs. Blocky text sits on simple decorative grounds, avoiding the diaphanous layerings of obsessively painterly engagements with surface, and transcribe the spatial grandeur of the more bombastic of Ed Ruscha's horizon-hugging signage into claustrophobic square patternings like polite slices of wallpaper design. 

'ALLEGORICAL NUDES' announces a dark blue acrylic and gouache; 'PHOTOGRAPHED AT LEAST ONCE    IF NOT TWICE' darkening blue letters observe seated on a washy pink background; 'BOB' has the eponymous Bob (or possibly an insinuated verb 'Bob') as text on a scruffy skyblue hovering over a white strip of horizon; keeping it simple 'TUPPERWARE IN HER APARTMENT' states a blank white square of canvas board - and so, inventively, on and on goes the pithy little text works. All enjoyably slightly left-field and smile inducing.

The pivotal piece is the most easily overlooked one, 'Entre tes reins (Unknown Meeting)' (2017) already handily 'meta' with its description of 'painting-drawing printed onto vinyl, on vinyl.'  A small portrait format rectangle of yellow vinyl stuck directly on the wall, each corner infected by a thumb print scale, slightly raised simulation of blue tack. 

It places the viewer on the wrong side of a hastily produced office notice, combines the functional, banal and eye-catching with a spatially impossible vantage point, and in the process reanimates the attenuated confabulations of the neighbouring sculptures; enforcing an unanchored solidity to them. One which then loops back to the interleaving two-dimensional simplicity of the text work.

Tracer and Wedge

‘Tracer and Wedge’ is an exhibition spread through the L-shaped ground floor project space of Mirabel Studios (Manchester, UK) populated with wall based art work, all responding to 'painting' as a broad thematic.

All artists involved have a historical or active relationship with Manchester art, often going back decades, and this shows in the focus and refinement within their practices; a kind of radical conservatism which seems oddly refreshing.

The relatively small scale of the works exhibited demands an enforced intimacy between viewer and work. An intimacy unconcerned with the surrounding architecture; except as a vertical support for the isolated sparring between surface and eye.  

There is also an added complication, the works tend to allude to the act of using painting as a way of momentarily holding static the act of transcription between artistic forms.

As an introductory example, David Alker's 'The Seventeenth Century Landscape' sequence of five miniature paintings - most about 8 cm square - are transcriptions of photographs of a 1920s diorama of the construction of a large seventeenth century wooden ship. With titles sounding like chapters from Moby Dick ('The Hull', 'Capstan', The Ferry', etc) the horizontal line of representational paintings of the act of construction imply a narrative progression without a promise of chronological veracity.

Rick Copsey's 'Paintscapes' also uses a reduced scale - here all 20 cm square - in a horizontal display of stormy colour-tinted c-type prints of gothic seascapes. They are, in fact, microscopic photographs of paint palettes vastly enlarged. Another frustratingly layered act of transcription.

The relatively simple still life format of Rebecca Sitar's  slightly larger oil paintings 'Untitled (Grey In Pink)', 'Pods' and 'Kernel' momentarily trick a viewer with a stabilizing familiarity but quickly reveal themselves to be equally destabilizing in the readability stakes: 'Untitled (Grey In Pink)' could be a rocky island sat on top of a pale wash of pink over grey or a ragged shape cut in the surface wash. 'Pods' seem to be constructing themselves from the space around them and, best of all, 'Kernel' is an ill-defined shape sat in a seductively deep purple black.

In stylistic opposition are Nick Jordan's domestic scale oil paintings 'California Typewriter' and 'Documentary Sounds'.

Both have the strong graphic clarity of Pop Art; both appear to have been transplanted from a European art exhibition set some time in the 1960s. 

The most demandingly enigmatic pieces are Samantha Donnelly's framed c-type prints which look like collages with fragments of figures, studio shots and suggestive explanatory text - all indicating a magazine article about an artist and their work.

So within 'Tracer and Wedge' the containing rectangle of a picture surface can act as a platform for material play, an impossible spatial conundrum, or an idiosyncratic dissection and re-staging of historical models for fixing visual information.

So, microscopically small areas of paint palettes can transmute into gothic seascapes; severe formal signage allude to senses other than the optical; archaic dioramas can be unpicked and restaged as storyboarded narratives of the paintings own construction, whilst spartan still lifes start to drift away from a painterly and descriptive legibility.

However, edited from the chaos of the real world, all act as a temporary congealing of the movement of thought into a stubbornly solid object event; all allude to actions and forces which escape the controlling stamp of visibility.

'And Breathe...' : Art and Mindfulness

Certain words and associated concepts are forever linked to a particular moment in our collective history. It is hard to think of a more suitable candidate for a 2018 buzzword than 'mindfulness.' 

It appears to have started out as a well-intentioned proposal that everyone should find a period of mental calm from the stress and bullying demands of the everyday. 

Unfortunately, it has morphed into something altogether different; a kind of zen indifference to reality and a social-bonding session for middle-managers in denial about any personal ethical responsibility for their actions.

The 'And Breathe...' exhibition currently wedged into a room at Manchester Galleries (Manchester, UK) tries the unenviably difficult job of cello-taping a relentlessly positive interpretation of 'mindfulness' to selected paintings and images from the galleries collection. 

Predictably the repetitive slap and curl of rolling waves are insinuated in a number of works referencing that holiday-makers favourite anaesthetic the sea. 

Ben Nicholson's 'St Ives Bay, Sea With Boats' (1931) oil and pencil scene of distant sailboats bobbing on a watery green sea has the unnerving charm of a child's painting. The fleshy pinks of a foregrounded rock, the organizing of the view by the framing white window-frame and window sill along with the suggestion of a reflected cloud and bulbous land mass make it a slightly disturbing rather than a becalming experience.

Henry Moore's 'Mounts Bay: Early Morning - Summer" (1886) dispenses with anything but horizon-line, sky and sculpturally heavy ridges of dark sea. 

Similarly weighty J.D. Innes oil painting  'Bala Lake' (1911) is a dark blue, purple and mauve bay with a sickly green-yellow sky, a weird gothic Fauvism. It's ornately elaborate frame makes the whole thing look like an indigestible pastry, but an intriguingly odd one. It is a style of painting which tends to attract the description 'brooding.' The connection to any notion of calming 'mindfulness' is again questionable.

In Tristram Hillier's 'Le Havre De Grace' (1939) parts of a large disassembled ship have been left like enigmatic chess pieces cluttering a dockside. The result seems like a De Chirico seaside scene.

Albert Irvin's abstract oil and acrylic 'Untitled' (1973) shows a wash of Naples yellow, a hazy caramel tissue, anchored at the top and bottom of the slightly bowing stretcher by large daubs of watery paint. The colours of these are uncomfortably muddied as though the paint brushes had not been properly washed.

Catherine Yass's 'Split Sides' digital inkjet of distorted reflected images of skyscrapers is fairly underwhelming and blandly decorative.

The piece which accidentally hits the critical mark by noting humans actual inability to completely edit the badgering tangle of accumulated worries carried around by our grey matter is Marcus Coates 'Sea Mammal' (2003). 

A suited character in front of a cold slate grey sea has its head encased in a tangle of primary coloured sausage shaped balloons. The comic befuddlement radiating from the work combined with its visually seductive simplicity at last begins to address the contrary impulses which co-exist in the 'mindfulness' industries.

David Pugh: Breaking The Surface

                                                                    

Out in leafy Lancashire, Todmorden’s ‘Studio 2’ gallery continues its welcome run of exhibitions of artwork made by individuals sticking with obdurate, solid stuff intended to hang on a wall or sit on the floor, i.e. paintings, drawings and sculptures.

Not that previous shows haven’t toyed with historical references, the mental gymnastics of ‘art’ theory, or self-reflexive chin-rubbing. All, however, have, to varying degrees, seemed to have an investment in material solidity and old-school concerns with aesthetic principles.

David Pugh’s recent exhibition of paintings, ‘Breaking The Surface’, appeared to organically continue on from these concerns but proposed a very different perspective on the function of a paintings surface; Pugh’s works play with surface as a point of display and as a ghostly restaging of nonrepresentational paintings muted keening for meaningfulness.

The exhibition related text noted that ‘...through this body of work (Pugh) explores the process of pushing paint to perform in ways that bring the surface of the canvas alive.’

However, although all three-dimensional objects occupy the same kind of space - a universal three-dimensionality central to all forms of ‘objectness’ - flatness can either be absolutely aligned with surface, appear to hover in front of its grounding vertical plane or even seem to retreat slightly to a point just behind the touchable material supporting it. Pugh’s works may obsess over surface qualities visual impact but they exhibit a technician’s curiousity with this potential misalignment between surface apprehended and surface as concrete fact.

With ‘Closed 1’ and ‘Closed 2’ two domestic scale square canvases seemed to have decided to operate as a diptych. Both showed a vegetable chaos of marks of varying black-greys punctuated by small areas of white canvas ground. ‘Closed 1’ carried the disruptive overlay of a large blue circle of acrylic, ‘Closed 2’ a black vertical band. The juxtaposition of the two canvases strengthened the works, the space between them acting as a further simple negative space which complicated the spatial relationships of bold simple forms and twitchy surface marks.

Something like a convoluted snaking intestine of broad brushmarks sat within the flat surface of the larger ‘Happy.’ Like ‘Closed 1’, a large raised area of light blue acrylic sat on the surface of the wandering, deceptively flat, gothic spaghetti of grey-black brushmarks. 

The other larger painting ‘Black Flower’ had a similar but slightly more angular swoop of brush traces but, bringing to mind the perforations bordering old strips of photographic film, horizontal lines of regularly distanced black circles travelled across the top and bottom of the painting. 

A triptych of smaller square canvases, ‘Inwoods 1’, ‘2’ and ‘3,’ all bordered by thick blankly black frames, were washed by singular dominant colours - red, muted blue and a grassy green - which visually suppressed the complex of sliding brushstrokes busying their entire surface. Isolated raised circles of colour dotted each one bringing to mind another cinema reference, the flash of an editors cue-dots.

Pugh is old enough to have experienced at least a couple of the noisy announcements of the death of painting, its stumbling resurrection and the theoretical back-peddling to begin again the inevitable reassessment of its viability as a contemporary practice.

The acrylic paint covering these works tended to colonize and fill the full area of the canvas but as a flat immaterial suggestion of something more physically substantial. Pugh’s paintings act as a record of dogmatic process as a kind of embodied sarcasm; self-doubting painting events - executed presumably at speed to maintain a tonal uniformity - which have become seduced by their own material playfulness. These are objects assigned the job of performing the role of being paintings which have fallen in love with their own performance.

All the works had a dour attractiveness about them and although they seemed to radiate a degree of resignation - a resignation that non-representational painting has declined into a genre of refined decoration - this was mixed with a strangely positive acknowledgement that the aspirations of yesteryear will always haunt potentially cynical ‘decor’ with the ghost of meaningfulness.