Project 5 : Paintings and Representations of the Changing
City
by Pam Meecham
"The 'idealist' realist artwork, one which pictured
production as tangible, fundamental truth, has evaporated,
a victim of the recognition that the master narratives,
even those of liberation, were always going to be repressive".
Terry Smith (1996)
|
all
that is soild melts into air 1987 |
Modernity and modernisation are historically linked: the
social conditions of today are the product of the technical,
scientific and political changes ushered in by the Industrial
Revolution. The experience of modernity has largely been
a metropolitan affair with the countryside allotted the
role of rural, rustic 'other'. Even if from a postmodern
perspective we no longer accept the notion of a universal
experience of modernity, metropolitan development has been
central to the 'fleeting and ephemeral' experience of modern
life. The 'rootless cosmopolitan' and émigré
transgressed national boundaries to utilise the city as
locus of the intricate exchanges of communication, alienation
and development that have constituted life in the city.
By the turn of the nineteenth century the cityscape, with
its icons to modernity, its towering edifices, statues and
streets populated by the displaced and the newly respectable,
replaced history and myth as the subject of ambitious painting.
Karl Marx envisaged a revolutionary metropolis that would
act as the catalyst and sweep away all fixed, fast, social
relations, where famously, 'all that's solid would melt
into air'. With 1989 and the demise of the Eastern Bloc,
so the advertising and academic hype make clear, the city
or at least our quaint attachment to it has been eroded
to make way for the super highway and 'electronic cottage'.
Fixed, fast social relations have been swept away, although
not in the form Marx envisaged. Rapidly changing social
interactions and our relationship to moments of the past,
it would seem, have become problematic.
The historian, Eric Hobsbawm observed, that currently we
are living, 'in a sort of permanent present lacking any
organic relation to the past' [1] If our current condition
can be characterised as one of lost certainties, Clarke's
paintings act as an archaeology of knowledge where fragments
of the past, the modern city, its politics, monuments and
manifestos coalesce. In these paintings, metropolitan images,
many of Liverpool, are juxtaposed with a history of modernist
painting. Modernism, no easier to locate a precise definition
now than a hundred years ago, is still an area of considerable
controversy. In terms of painting its allocated role is
of radical exploration of media, allied to a rejection of
academic and bourgeois norms. Primacy is often given to
the texture and colour of expressionistic forms. Clarke
appropriates the formal language of modernist experimentation
and in almost baroque form melds it with the excluded histories
of the city. A de legitimated historic past, meets a beleaguered
modernist art form. The paintings depict the tropes of power
and knowledge but do not present a coherent past from the
vantage point of the present. Power and knowledge are of
course dependent on each other for legitimation. These works
articulate this symbiotic link but leave the questions unanswered.
The Apollonian restraint of the Walker Art Gallery's Nicolas
Poussin Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion
(1648), depicting the disgraced Athenian hero ignominiously
buried in an alien land, is played out against the text,
Changed and Not New.
Monuments
The city and its monuments are at the core of a section
of Clarke's earlier work. Monuments are almost invisible
in the city by virtue of their banal familiarity. They are
however crucial in establishing a kind of 'collected memory'[2]
of what is important to retain of the past and crucially
the form of that remembering.
[1] Hobsbawm, Eric Age of Extremes: the Short Twentieth
Century 1914 1991.
[2] See Young, James Texture of Memory
Civic pride and the fragments of text are combined often
in arcane ways to make a critique of the past, to remind
us that the arts no less than any other form of production
is ideological and therefore an apparatus of state control.
The public monument was one of the casualties of modernism.
The apparent ease with which we celebrated past victories
and the confident rhetoric of national pride sat uneasily
beside the modernist notion of the subjective self and a
sculptural practice that seems more about individual contemplation
than pride in collective endeavour. Alterity, currently
mitigates against representing others, against the notion
of a collective identity. Modern sculpture in public places,
abandoning the pedestal and the traditional materials of
bronze and stone, has been marked by its very lack of permanence.
In these paintings the re emergence of the Victorian monuments
and eclectic architectural details (signifiers of public
order, civic and national citizenship) act as a reminder
of their absent presence and of their value laden orthodoxies.
Disparate cityscapes become follies and the inhabitants
(external, internal, public, private) remind us of unresolved
conflicts, political, artistic and social.
Painting
The paintings in this exhibition are representative of a
dilemma that became a paradox during the late twentieth
century; the artist's relationship to paint and politics.
In summary, is the artist, necessarily, an agent of social
change or is the production of art determined by the political
and social praxis of any given historical moment? Given
the first, rather than the absolute determinism of the second,
can any sort of social transformation come about through
the application of paint to canvas? This dilemma is a major
preoccupation for many artists aware of the consequences
for society that the move from analogue to digital technologies
has brought about. Changes in art production, storage and
exchange have increasingly undermined our sense of self
but the issue surfaced much earlier in the history of modern
art. The issue has, in recent years, threatened to submerge
artistic practice into a catatonic state of inaction or
indifferentism. A subsidence into forms of solipsism, that
only the self is knowable or a relativism that validates
a withdrawal from the broader political arena to niche areas
of practice, has been widespread.
Clarke's work of the eighties and nineties revisits some
of the debates by returning to Edouard Manet whose 'concrete
realism' for some historians marked the start of the modernist
project. The American critic, Michael Fried, in Manet's
Sources, observed that Manet's art did a kind of violence
to the past, that his referencing of earlier artists (Giorgione,
Goya, Velasquez) was an attempt to 'reclaim the past, to
re possess it, and thereby to establish its presence in
his art in a new way... to liquidate the past and so enter
a new world'. The familiarity of the modernist rhetoric
of originality and authenticity is rehearsed here.
Fried continues to assert that, after Manet, only the art
of the immediate past is relevant. What was needed was an
engagement with the 'historical present'. Foregrounding
future modernist practices, he maintained that 'no painter
since Manet has been faced with the need to secure the connectedness
of his art to that of the distant past, to the enterprise
of the Old Masters. With Manet's paintings of the first
half of the sixties, that simply and without notice disappeared
as a problem for painting'. To revisit Manet then is to
resuscitate a fugitive enterprise.
The battle for custody of Manet's project has preoccupied
writers and artists for several decades. For American critics
Fried and Greenberg, writing a century later, Manet was
conscripted into the progressive move towards abstraction.
The teleology of Greenberg's project is well rehearsed and
so will occupy no further time here except to say that Manet's
formalism and political engagement has been most cogently
analysed in T.J. Clark's early works.[31 Clark sites Manet's
work within the broader social and political climate of
Modernity in 19th century Paris. Pete Clarke's work continues
the discursive debate by questioning the dominance of the
formalist modernist position within twentieth century art:
questioning how can or why should art works be a separate
sphere of aesthetic activity? In doing this Clarke bypasses
the obvious choices of the infamous Olympia
(1865) or The Bar at the Folies Bergeres
(1882). He 'borrows' the dying Manet's last works, the flower
paintings from 1881 1883, both in homage to the father of
modernism but also as a timely reminder of some of the unfinished
projects of modernity. Flowers function as emblems and are
forced to occupy the symbolic function placed upon them.
Annexed to social and political causes they resonate.
There is another historical shade in these paintings: the
language of another modernism, construction. Taking another
historical precedent, Clarke reworks the Utopian modernist
project of Russian Constructivism where, in part, the aesthetic
was seen as retrogressive, imbibed with the language of
composition. Rodchenko maintained that 'the inaccurate,
trembling line traced by the hand cannot compare with the
straight and precise line drawn with the set square, reproducing
the design exactly. Hand crafted work will have to try to
be more industrial, Drawing as it wasconceived in the past
loses its value and is transformed into diagram or geometric
projection'. Alexander Rodchenko, The Line.
[3] See Eds: Frascina, F. and Harrison, C. Preliminaries
to a Possible Treatment
of 'Olympia' in 1865 1982
Clark, T. J. Image of the People Gustave Courbet and the
1848 Revolution
Thames and Hudson 1973
Clark, T. J. The Absolute Bourgeois Artist and Politics
in France 1848 1851
Thames and Hudson 1973
The language of expression and gesture vies with the revolutionary
programmes of Wassily Kandinsky and Alexander Rodchenko
not in the hope of resolution but through juxtapositions
and mixed codes to question the palpable ambiguities of
the ideologies that make up the histories of modern painting.
Clarke's works, while drawing on constructivism and expressionist
brush strokes, toy with the avant gardist sense of continually
searching for the new, the innovative, that philosopher
George Simmel as earlyas 1900 in Philosophy of Money predicted,
would result in the commodification of culture. The quest
for novelty in art would turn it into a fashion accessory
for the rich. The spectre of commodification haunts these
paintings like Malvollo at the feast. Political art goes
in and out of fashion but Clarke tenaciously reworks the
old dilemmas and paradoxes. The self conscious reworking
of historical models and motifs, the revisiting of theoretical
grand narratives (Marxism) is linked to the forbidden fruit
of pleasure in paint in order to extract the possibility
of meaning for both. Clarke's handling of paint is both
critical and heretical. It recalls the painterly modernism
of Greenberg who argued that the lasting shock of the new
'had to do with his (Manet's) handling of the medium alone
.Similarly, the Impressionists, coming in Manet's wake,
caused shock or scandal by nothing more than the way they
used paint' (Greenberg 1965).
Manet's
legacy is the fought over terrain of modernism, the opening
skirmishes in establishing what an avant garde could be
and the terms by which it would resist commodity status
and the 'perils' of mass culture. Manet's paintings were
'the first modernist ones by virtue of the frankness with
which they declared the surfaces on which they were painted'
(Greenberg 1965) The debate hardened in the 1970s and 1980s
and many artists abandoned painting altogether in favour
of supposedly less value laden new technologies. The anti
expressionism of some postmodern theorists (see particularly
The Expressive Fallacy Hal Foster) saw the mphasis on the
expressive possibilities of the painted surface asa retreat
from the fray. Clarke's work takes the most seductive of
media frequently abandoned because of its historical legacy
and attempts to retrieve its critical possibilities. The
battle for realism is still being playedout in paint but
not exclusively so.
Collage and Realism
Clarke often incorporates into his paintings, fragments
of the 'real' such as newspaper cuttings, old photographs,
torn books. The early modernist strategy, adopted by the
Cubist enterprise as a means of exposing the artificiality
of paint, canvas and depicted objects, has been appropriated
into postmodern theory. Here, the claim to primacy of collage
as an art form is its ability to bring together diverse
elements, to double code and operate at different levels
but also to allow for quotation and repetition. This, at
least in part, undermines the notion of the original author,
one of the fictions of modernism. Clarke's work uses irony,
eclecticism and historical sources in a Brechtian way to
remind the viewer that we are engaged in a kind of fiction
but that through this fiction we might gain a glimpse of
another reality.
|
Environs
- Structures: Cleaning the Titian 1991 |
Interventionist art practice is usually characterised by
binary oppositions: the realism of the real against the
fiction of paint. Too often realism, in art, has been linked
to ideas around resemblance. In the minds of the public
and authoritarian regimes (particularly Socialist Realism)
at least the closer the image to a recognisable, identifiable
object, person, place, the greater the worth. Accessibility
and political commitment have at several significant moments
been synonymous with more figurative forms of realism. Clarke's
work does flirt with the forms of realism so familiar in
the 1930s Depression work of Americas New Deal and post
war British domestic realism. The views of Liverpool show
an engagement with real places and recognisable monuments,
however, any straight forward correlation of place and depiction
would be simplistic. Although the century's early realists
worked with paint, increasingly collage and mixed media
became a more convincing way of operating. To render the
ordinary and everyday as real it became important to reveal
the underlying structures that supported the system of class
relations that were difficult to expose through mimetic
realism.
The satirical Dada collages of John Heartfield and Hannah
Hoch that attacked the society and politics of Weimar Germany,
set a precedent for political artists working against comfortable
armchair art. Like the montage work of the Russian filmmaker
Eisenstein, a realism predicated upon traditional narratives
and sequences that engaged in a fiction of an illusory realism,
was rejected by many artists as a working method. All realisms
are contingent, although not just that, but an acknowledgement
of that partiality is crucial. Clarke's paintings create
a tension between the need to depict the instability of
modern life and the underlying structures that commodify
our existence with the competing claims of art's presumed
internal laws.
The references to Manet's flower paintings combined with
text reminds the viewer of the possibility of an art that
is relatively autonomous that is still governed by its own
internal rules. The dilemma still occupies the artists who
have not abandoned art for the indifferentism or nihilism
of much post modern work. The competing demands of a realism
that does not slide into the clichéd or propagandist
and a painterly realism that does not slip into the merely
decorative world of tasteful abstractions often leads to
a pyrrhic victory. Clarke's work attempts to uncover social
relations, a form of social critique particularly pertinent
to the city of Liverpool but not exclusively so. His work
reveals the contradictions inherent in civic and Victorian
order and the fragmentation of the city in paint and text
Letters
to Language. The
relationship of language to art is marked by competing claims.
The interplay of the visual and the verbal is not always
cohesive. At the level of the routinely rehearsed we do
not read words in the way that we read pictures which represent
differently languages sometimes seems an inadequate tool
with which to approach any understanding of a painting.
The encroachment of text into art, sometimes resulting in
purely text based works has been a marker of progressive
work since the early Cubist collage. The artist's lexicon
has been extended to incorporate words and ideas assimilated
from literary theory and sociology into art works. Poststructuralist
theories have pointed out the instability of language's
relationship to language. Letters to Language resonates
with the ambiguities that text offers. The American poet,
Emily Dickinson in fragmented works famously offered her
poetry as 'my letter to the world that never wrote to me.'
Dickinson's work explored the limits of language, a kind
of 'poetry of disembodiment'. The Amherst recluse withdrew
from the world, her art, her poems being her contribution
to the world. Within the romantic world of self sacrifice
for art, Dickinson is paradigmatic. The 'letters' she believed
revealed the soul and so her calculated withdrawal and isolationism
is measured against her poetry. Clarke's use of the feminine
letter form has something of the poet in it. In addition,
however, the knowledge that language, or at least a 'realist'
concept of language, is probably flawed lurks behind the
written text. To see our words as neutral representations
of the world with fixed meanings of a fixed reality is no
longer a simple option. structuralist denial of definitive
truths and the play of constructivist devices sets up the
possibility of new interpretations.
Clarke's 'letter to the world', addresses memory, artifice
and loss. They invite the viewer to question from their
own subjective position. There is a possibility of a collapse
into relativism and the harsh terrain of deconstruction
that would omit an infinite number of interpretations. The
upside is the opening up of possibilities, the open question.
Clarke's work attempts to make a visual equivalent of the
social, political and aesthetic conditions that inform our
fragmentary lives.
Pam Meecham
Liverpool John Moores University
April 1998
References
Eds: Frascina, Francis and Harrison, Charles Modern Art
and Modernism
: A critical Anthology Harper and Row 1982
Greenberg, Clement Modernist Painting 1965
Hobsbawm, Eric Age of Extremes: the Short Twentieth Century
19141991.
Eds: Nelson and Shift Critical Terms for Art History, Essay
by Terry Smith Modes of Production Chicago 1996 Loving,
Jerome Emily Dickinson the poet on the Second Story Cambridge
University Press 1986.