Entries (RSS) Virginia MacKenny’s ‘Artworks in Progress’, 2006
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19th September 2008 | Other items by Jacqueline |
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- Virginia MacKenny; ‘Artworks in Progress’; Michaelis School of Fine Arts journal; 2006, University of Cape Town Not for Data (2005) oil on canvas, 12-panel polyptych (each panel 700×700mm) Surfacing - Levels of Flatness I In Margaret Attwood’s ‘Surfacing’ the main protagonist plumbs the depths of her own being, and at the end of the novel, returning from a naked sojourn in the woods, she surfaces back into the public world. In David Joselit’s essay ‘Notes on Surface – Towards a Genealogy of Flatness’ (2000) he reminds us that even the high priest of modernism, Clement Greenberg, bifurcates flatness, that modernist fundamental of surface, into optical and emotional depth. Joselit continues to reinforce the prevarications of surface by highlighting an interesting conundrum namely that, “flatness, which is traditionally associated with a teleological process toward self-referentiality within modern painting, has also served as the reigning metaphor of its supposed negation, postmodernism” (Joselit in Kocur and Leung 2005: 293). While flatness in modernism refers to an essentialising of surface, in postmodernism it refers more specifically to pastiche, simulation and levelling of values. Joselit asserts, “flatness… in our globalised world is more than an optical effect” (ibid). Aware of these ambiguities of terrain Not for Data (2005), as in the earlier and larger Sleepers – Sightlines (2003), plays with a topography of oppositional positions never allowing one to gain pre-eminence. Surface becomes a focus primarily because, as even the modernists eventually had to acknowledge, it is impossible to obliterate depth entirely – a vestige always remains. Rooted in the perceptual, surface is never fixed - an uncertainty that is reinforced in painting. Perhaps instructively the painter Jonathan Lasker sees painting as a “reification of reality’ where painting is both act and object allowing one to “perceive the world through matter” (Lasker in Moos 1996: 11). Not for Data engages with surface in a number of ways. Formally it exploits the imposition of the modernist grid that was designed to flatten and assert the plane of the canvas, it engages largeness of scale and lateral extension as a means to displace illusionistic recession and it employs the language of abstraction in diagrams plus a plain square of colour all of which reiterate a sense of surface. Reinforcing ambiguity the dappled surfaces of the paint encourage one to both acknowledge the surface texture of the paint and also to perceive a spatial possibility within/between the paint marks, on or beyond the canvas surface. Further disrupting assertions of flatness are images that, in their treatment, enjoy the tradition of illusionist painting. Plato’s proverbial distrust of visual artists lay, of course in our tendency to be seduced into believing what we see in a painting, in our willingness to rely on the eye – the site/sight of untold deceptions. The repeated utilisation of the square, inherently a self-reflexive form, as the format for all the panels provides an easy centralising locus and focus for each object/image. Compositionally each thing or object depicted in each square is isolated from its context – separated out and placed centrally. The formal vocabulary of the icon, extracted and condensed, valorises the individual, albeit secular, object. However, by virtue of its equal proportions with every other panel in the grid, the square also gives equal credence to each image, countering the idea of ‘specialness’. It allows images from a variety of different sources to be given parity. The squares imply objectivity, a standard of measurement, as though these were scientific samples with each object given equal space, separated out, counted, analysed. Not for Data’s reliance on logic and rationality is echoed in some of its sources. From science and from museum collections come the computer-generated image of the Stick Figure Universe created by red shift surveys , the coelacanth photographed in the British Museum of Natural History in London, the diagram of a fish bone’s proportional ratios in terms of the Golden Section as analysed by Gyorgy Doczi (1981) and the decoy ducks from the Folk Museum in New York. Not for Data’s credentials as marker of science though are somewhat dubious. According to Edward R Tufte in his book Visual Explanation – Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative (1997) data displays must be “clear, assured, reliable and sturdy” (p73). Art and science have traditionally occupied polar positions – soft/hard, visual/logical, random/systematic, autonomous/collaborative, female/male. Clearly stated by Caroline Jones the “binary production of knowledge (the bifurcation of practices) was equally simple: art invented, science discovered’ (Jones and Galison 1998:2). However, as she also points out, “art and science and the hermeneutical concepts that we bring to them are historically and culturally embedded. Neither practice has unique and absolute purchase on “reality’, and neither is as alienated from history as its rhetoric might imply” (Jones and Galison 1998:3). Complicating the matter further in Not For Data the languages of science and religion conflate in the framework of art – a fusion of contexts meshing with each other. In this syncretic form both a flattening and expansion of meaning occurs. While the specificity of the images depicted is relatively clear and the objects rendered are reasonably delineated, their significance is elusive, hence their meaning is neither assured nor sturdy and they are not reliable as data. If ‘not for data’, then for what? Painting is a means of exploring the world as I experience it, as I think it, as I come across it. For me it is a heuristic practice producing an end product unknown at its commencement, a product that is not preordained, but prompted by a variety of ‘finds ’ along the way. Not for Data seeks intermediate space before/beyond clarity. One cannot use it to prove anything, one cannot use it to assure oneself – it draws off nebulous sites of memory and relies on the, long discredited, temptations of nostalgia. It both reasserts its traditions while doubting their certitudes. Not for Data, in a sense, plays with expectations. According to Bruno Latour (2002: 34) “an isolated scientific image is meaningless, it proves nothing, says nothing, shows nothing, has no referent. Why? Because a scientific image, even more than a Christian religious one, is a set of instructions to reach another one down the line” (Latour’s italics). In Not For Data this is both implied and denied – the images lack a direct line of reference that might instruct, make sense or come to some point of conclusion. At the same time referents are provided and the viewer is asked to reflect on associations generated by the objects/images themselves and to make connections between the juxtaposed images. III Some of the objects depicted carry the weight of association so strongly they are almost subsumed by it. The Christmas tree, in particular, is an object of deep nostalgia. It is also, of course, a symbol of a particularly important time within the Christian calendar. However it is this very aspect, while understood by most Western viewers, that by sheer repetition has served to vacate the very meaning it is supposed to hold. As Latour asks of icons “have they not been emptied by aesthetic judgement, absorbed by art history, made routine by conventional piety to the point of being dead forever?” (2002:18). If this is so then the Christmas tree, far from becoming a repository for pious focus, becomes a hollow vessel, emptied of its liturgical meaning. If evacuated of its traditional significance, however, it becomes, potentially, a space for other meanings. Seen in different contexts the Christmas tree takes on new associations as Christmas trees found in Africa, in summer, do. In Not For Data one depicted is made of metal and electric light bulbs, left up all year round, darkened icon of a time of festivity while a post-season Christmas tree found in a basement in New York, is wrapped in plastic. These and others images in the piece may evoke a sense of being ‘out-of-place’.
Preserved specimen of a coelacanth in the Natural History Museum, London Central to the idea of displacement is the image of the coelacanth, whitened by formaldehyde, suspended in its display case in the British Museum of Natural History. When I saw this particular specimen held in its reliquary of preserving fluid, its pale waxiness glowing under the museum spotlights, its one visible eye seemed transfixed in a quietly appalled awareness of its state of suspension. Out of its natural habitat, removed from the oceans of Africa, it is free-floating, but fixed in space - a trophy in the halls of European science. The coelancanth was first found in fossil form dating 400 million years back. Believed extinct until, in 1938, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer discovered one in a fisherman’s catch off the coast of East London it is found at considerable depths and remains a hidden creature, difficult to locate. Clumsy to the eye, perhaps, and yet fluent in its native medium, it is a survivor. Described as a living fossil it was initially thought to be the intermediary between fish and amphibians. While this idea has subsequently been abandoned the coelacanth still seems inchoate as though it has come back from the past to remind us of our beginnings. My interest in the coelacanth has, I suspect, some imaginative parallel to Freud’s fascination with the lamprey eel. His investigative drawings of its nervous system explored the morphological Another, perhaps more direct example of this tendency resides in the image of the Stick Figure Universe. This image was constructed from information gleaned from redshift surveys which astronomers utilise to record galaxies, quasars and intergalactic gas clouds. The evidence gathered reinforces the idea that the universe is expanding – that its edges are indeterminate. When scientists viewed the resultant computer-generated graphic depiction of the universe as we know it they saw, perhaps predictably, an image of the human figure, albeit in rudimentary form . Whether hubris or child-like wonder it would seem to reflect the human need to make pictures of our world. Ellen Dissanayake, an independent scholar in socio-biology, believes that art making is an “innate behaviour that is essential to our human, biological nature” and that it is a process that fulfils an “underlying biological proclivity in humans” (Dissanayake in Gablik 1995: 43). Coining the term Homo aestheticus (ibid: 42) she argues for art as an act of “making things special”. Our penchant for making things special, in the case of the Stick Figure Universe, anthropomorphises our universe. The centralised positioning of humankind within the cosmos has a long history. It is echoed in other images embedded, subliminally as it were, in the construction of Not for Data. Half-perceived images, rooted more within a collective visual memory than in themselves directly evident, lurk in the associative background of the work. Recalled or evoked from the canon of western culture, these images include, most notably, Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, an echo of a series of Friedrich paintings that contain images of firs in stark landscapes often with the spire of a church beyond them, the Fibonacci series and its geometry and, as already mentioned, icons. These associative memories inform some of the content of Not For Data reinforcing, through their historical pedigree, certain readings of the work but also bringing into question the very authority such images reinforce. The Abbey in the Oakwood (Friedrich, 1810)
The Vitruvian Man (da Vinci, ca. 1487) Each image has been chosen to set up a counterpoint of ideas. For instance the inclusion of the decoy ducks is, amongst other things, a wry reference to the bête noire of decorative clichés – flying ducks across a wall. Here, in a painterly conceit, the ‘wall’ is the flat surface of the canvas. This somewhat counteracts the Renaissance idea of the painting as being a window to the world - a world behind the canvas surface. In Not for Data the utilisation of trompe l’oeil illusionistically creates a world in front of the canvas surface. The ‘flying ducks’ are also an ironic reference, in my own mind, to an artistic patronage dominated by buyers desiring something that goes with their lounge suite. While handmade decoy ducks are generally valued for their craftsmanship and decorative qualities this is a focus that avoids engaging with their darker function - as lures to death. Such subtexts exist in the choice of some of the other images. The small rocket firework evokes festive displays, but the words “Plane drops Parachute by Night” inscribed on it might remind one of other more nefarious night-time ‘drops’. Post the CNN recorded after-dark assaults on Baghdad in 2003 our visual memory is now informed by pyrotechnics with more violent implications. Other airborne engagements are emodied in the helicopters that hover in the skies above Cape Town . During the dryness of the summer heat, they become vehicles for the drama of fire fighting. Lifted airborne water vacates its home in the reservoirs and the sea for the sky and aids in the extinguishing of flames on mountainsides of fynbos or in the shacklands. This displacement of water into space epitomises other themes that runs through the work those of transition and suspension . In other examples what swims beneath the seas is suspended in space pinioned by sightlines; what floats on water is removed and pinned on the wall; objects are dislocated from their context existing in indeterminate fields of tertiary colour. The only canvas without an image (the pink one) may, at first, be overlooked. Merely a painted pink panel, no object, no icon, no picture to draw one’s attention to it. While each painted object or image is, within every panel, made special, within the framework of the entire piece its prominence is levelled out, flattened. In the case of the pink panel the reverse is true. Non-specific at first it forms, in a sense, a speculative punctum in the work. Unlike Roland Barthes’ punctum, which is seen to reside in an initially unnoticed detail, the pink panel, ironically, lacks pictorial detail. It is only by virtue of its optical intensity that it calls to be regarded. The viewer may determine the colour filling the surface of the panel as pink. Its trade name is Permanent Rose. This hidden aspect, clearly not directly available to the viewer, seems a contradiction in terms for one of the most fugitive of colours. Gertrude Stein’s famous dictum “a rose is a rose is a rose” asserts, given the ephemerality of flowers, the kind of permanence possible only in the conceptual realm. The wounding ‘prick’ that Barthes saw as integral to the punctum in a work is here, as hidden ‘thorn’ from a rose , cloaked in abstraction. Both Sleepers/Sightlines and Not For Data are works that actively encourage readings of intertextuality. Compositionally variations on the cruciform shape permeate the structure of the work and many of its images producing diverse points of crossing. The intersections of horizontality and verticality are sometimes explicit, as in the grid, and sometimes implied just as Rothko’s constant reiteration of the horizontal did not necessitate any vertical engagement – it was there already, implicit in the verticality of his canvases. Occupying locations between the grid points the objects/images produce the visual paradox of coincident focal points. The added dimension that appears when lateral assertions of space are disrupted/extended by illusionistic penetration further complicates the web of interstices. Couched within the tradition of Western painting Not For Data relies on established visual conventions for its play. Its subjects are drawn from the arenas of both logic and sentiment. Within these apparent binaries it utilises the language of the sacred to depict the oversubscribed, hence the devalued. Avoiding an either/or situation a constant optical and associative vacillation provides space for multiple perceptions and the enjoyment of equivocal positions. Resisting fixity or certitude it engages in an ever-shifting play between surface and the surfacing of different embedded meanings. Bibliography Attwood, Margaret (1979) Surfacing Virago Press Ltd, London |
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