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‘Evil was the hour when she saw and loved and wedded the painter…’1
Edgar Allen Poe S U F R
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LAURENCE FIGGIS, MAY 2015 It is not that I can only imagine this marriage taking place in a faux-gothic structure, a castle made of celluloid, like the one in Snow White. But, if painters and printmakers, by their very defi nition lead ‘a fi ght against fl atness,’ then they imbue this struggle with occult anxiety.2 Peter Brooks, writing on melodrama and the ‘gothic’ in literature, refers to an ‘epistemology of depths,’ an anxiety focused on the uncanny tension between the surface of objects and what their interiors conceal. As he states in The Melodramatic Imagination, the gothic is fascinated by ‘what lies hidden in the dungeon and the sepulchre’; the castle ‘realizes an architectural approximation of the Freudian model of the mind, particularly the traps laid…by the unconscious and the repressed.’3
But to return to this evil hour – we fi nd, that in the realms of the gothic imagination, the sepulchre has been replaced by a shopping mall: for there is no space deeper and more treacherous than what Benjamin called, the ‘primordial landscape of consumption’.4 As Anne Friedberg writes, in her essay on ‘Cinema and the Postmodern Condition’: the ‘mall engulfs a passive subject within an illusory realm’. Like the theme park, its interiors are 'imagineered’…providing ‘a temperature-controlled refuge from hostile environments’.5 This in turn gives the illusion of the outdoors, an infi nite interior space. The shopping mall is fl uid, immersive, weightless, - a boundless arena of fl oating movement, where escalators provide a ‘serene glide’ to the shopper’s gaze.6
Marcel Duchamp when he painted The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelor’s Even (1915-23) was certainly aware of the shop window as a kind of ‘screen’ – equivalent to a cinema projection or trompe-l’oeil painted surface. Ditto the Surrealists; as Johanna Malt has written, something that immediately strikes us when looking at a painting by Salvador Dalí, is the ‘extraordinarily smooth glossiness of its surface.’7 Leaping forward to the 21st century, the winking dead-i’s of the Apple corpus glow with a seductive patina, ‘competing to be desired’.8
But there is always something behind this patina – an image – and the image is always moving. The Surrealist writer Louis Aragon’s description of the Passage de l’Opéra in his novel Paris Peasant (1926) contains a striking fantasmatic episode. The narrator, wandering in the arcade in the late evening is suddenly struck ‘by a sort of humming noise which seemed to be coming from the direction of the cane shop’. Investigating, he is astonished to discover that its window is ‘bathed in a greenish, almost submarine light, the source of which remained invisible’. He imagines that the ‘the whole ocean’ is contained in the Passage, and that beyond the canes, floating gently ‘like sea weed,’ a human form is gliding through the window-display.9
Marcel D
uch
amp
, Th
e Brid
e Strip
ped
Bare b
y Her B
achelo
rs, Even
/ spD
uch
amp
(Flickr) / CC
BY
2.0
Now we are cast adrift – and that’s appropriate; I’m thinking of how ‘breaking the surface’ (when in deep water) can function as a metaphor for rebirth, for baptism (for the ritual transition from one state to another) - or how, when we break a more solid surface (when we slash a hole in a canvas with a knife or throw a rock through a window) we are engaged in anarchy, in rupturing the symbolic authority of our material culture. There was a time, at the apex of high-modernism, when even to make a mark on a canvas was thought to violate the self-sufficiency, the much-lauded presentness and cultural value of the so-called ‘autonomous’ object. But in many myths and folk-tales, the ‘breaking of the surface’ - as rit-de-passage - coincides with the breaking of silence. And when painters and printmakers turn to public speaking and singing (as many of this year’s graduates do) they engage with aspects of performative expression that are analogous to material practice. In Jane Campion’s film The Piano (1993) the metaphors of voice and surface coincide at the story’s climax, when Ada, the film’s protagonist, who has not ‘spoken a word since she was six year’s old,’ is nearly drowned at sea but finds the wherewithal to save herself at the last moment. In the final frame she tells us that she ‘is learning to speak’; but at night she dreams of her piano, lying at the bottom of the ocean and sometimes of herself ‘floating above it’. ‘Down there,’ she tells us, ‘everything is so still and silent that it lulls me to sleep. It is a weird lullaby and so it is; it is mine’.10
1 Edgar Allen-Poe, ‘The Oval Portrait’ (1842), in The Works of Edgar Allen Poe in Five Volumes, web-version at Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/files/2147/2147-h/2147-h.htm#link2H_40014, 21.5.2015. 2 Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde, 2nd ed., (London; New York: Verso, 2004): 121. 3 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess, (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1976): 19. 4 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, (Cambridge, Mass.; London: Belknap Press, 1999): 827. 5 Anne Friedberg, ‘Cinema and the Postmodern Condition,’ in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, Linda Williams ed., (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University, 1995): 70. 6 Ibid: 70-71. 7 Johanna Malt, Obscure Objects of Desire: Surrealism, Fetishism and Politics, (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004): 208.
8 Laura Mulvey, ‘Some Thoughts on Theories of Festishism in the Context of Contemporary Culture,’ October 65, (Summer 1993): 10. 9 Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, trans. Simon Watson Taylor, (Boston: Exact Change, 1994): 21-23.
10 Jane Campion, The Piano, (London: Bloomsbury, 1993): 122.
Jane Campion, The Piano (still). All rights Independent Film Distributors (UK)
MARC SWEENEY / marcsweeney71@gmail.com
HAMISH CHAPMAN / hamishchapman.co.uk
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LILI
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HELEN JACKSON / helenisla.co.uk
TRISTAN LEICESTER / tristanleicester.com
your perfect craftunending in harmonyis the river bankcarved by love’s streamevery bow to you is a circlethat joins these two linesthe more love you give awaythe more you receiveOhow a drop of surrenderholds the ocean without shore
O howyour most delicate toucheffortless and impossiblelets the stars jumpup and downin lovewith being bornallows the windto kiss the cheeksof the blushing leavesO thou
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cargocollective.com/jackboutwood
LEA SAUTIN / leasautin.weebly.com
HANNAH MCDONALDcargocollective.com/hannahmcdonaldhannahl.mcdonald@btinternet.com
RE
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KERRY MCMANUS / cargocollective.com/kerrymcmanus
WHY WOULD I WALK AROUND LOOKING UGLY EVERYDAY WHEN I DON’T HAVE TO?
ST
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RACHEL DUFFY / rachelsduffy.com
ANNA THOMSON 07588828909annamthomson@live.conanna-thomson.co.uk
LEO ARNOLD07531133542
ljaarnold1@gmail.comleoarnold.co.uk
A :when you draw on metal it feels so permanent like carving your name on a tree
� e value of a work is not that
it is re� ned.. a good work has to be aliv e.
It’s about looking beyong the visible to imagine what might be there
Pet e r Doig - “ Painting means mov ing forward on a surface, getting lost, transcending yourself and b
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A: thoughts and feelings aren’t e asy to capture. but Drawing gets you closer
L: I paint quickly to capture a � eeting feeling or moment just as it is befo re it is gone.
“What I am
trying to get across is that material is a means of commu ni cation. � at lis
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A: � ere are things I have discovered
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L: I o� en paint from im
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ANNA THOMSON 07588828909annamthomson@live.conanna-thomson.co.uk
LEO ARNOLD07531133542
ljaarnold1@gmail.comleoarnold.co.uk
A :when you draw on metal it feels so permanent like carving your name on a tree
� e value of a work is not that
it is re� ned.. a good work has to be aliv e.
It’s about looking beyong the visible to imagine what might be there
Pet e r Doig - “ Painting means mov ing forward on a surface, getting lost, transcending yourself and b
ecom
ing
p
hysically submerged.”
A: thoughts and feelings aren’t e asy to capture. but Drawing gets you closer
L: I paint quickly to capture a � eeting feeling or moment just as it is befo re it is gone.
“What I am
trying to get across is that material is a means of commu ni cation. � at lis
tening t
o it,
not dominating it m
akes us truly act
ive,
that
is: to be active, be passive”. - Anni Alber s
A: � ere are things I have discovered
b
ut will ultimately remain mysterious
L: I o� en paint from im
agination, solidifying ideas from very little physical source material but from (sometimes false) memories of paintings
KA
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KN
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qyingyan.carbonmade.com
nur-dann-world.tumblr.com
TOM HEAP / Tomheap@hotmail.co.uk
KATE SLUDDEN / krsludden.com
Top: Collage from colour swatches Bottom: Detail from Degree show Installation
My work centres around the sensorial aesthetics of wandering the streets of Glasgow, I aim to bring elements of my experiences of the city inside. Impressions are made on objects and materials to form a family of elements which can relate to each other in a new space, creating an installation which recreates samples of my experiences.
Louise Worralllouise_worrall93@yahoo.fr
www.cargocollective.com/louiseworrall
NATHAN COOK / cargocollective.com/nathanjohncook
Top: Collage from colour swatches Bottom: Detail from Degree show Installation
My work centres around the sensorial aesthetics of wandering the streets of Glasgow, I aim to bring elements of my experiences of the city inside. Impressions are made on objects and materials to form a family of elements which can relate to each other in a new space, creating an installation which recreates samples of my experiences.
Louise Worralllouise_worrall93@yahoo.fr
www.cargocollective.com/louiseworrall
FRE
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ellawalker.me
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tJU GUAN / guanju.portfoliobox.me
LEWIS PROSSER / babaloose.com
CHITRA SANGTANI / totalreleasetotalamnesia.tumblr.com
CHITRA SANGTANI / totalreleasetotalamnesia.tumblr.com
MARTHA SIMMS / marthasimms.com
EV
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LUC
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“What is painted in the canvas is the body, not insofar as it is represented as an object, but insofar as it is experienced as sustaining this sensation.”
“Concerned with rhythm and balance, with total design, the artist searches to understand his own moves and to predict what their effects will be on his work. While he creates from an emotional basis, he is constantly analytical and reflective, and he strives for a logical totality.”
“They’re not quite landscapes, not geometric abstractions and not exactly colour-field painting either. They belong to a time and place but have in them times and places all their own. They’re accumulations of incident within a larger scheme of things.”
“One move dictated by reason, the next may be pure chance.”
WILL ALLEN / allenwill0@gmail.com
WILL A
LLEN
/ allenwill0@
gm
ail.com
WILL ALLEN / allenwill0@gmail.com ELENA MARY HARRIS / elenamaryharris.com
JUDITH HAGAN / judehagan.blogspot.co.uk
CHRISTOPHER BYRNE / cargocollective.com/chrisbyrnegsa
JUD
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HEAJAE JUNG / heajaejung.com
JULIE
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JAVIER MONTORO MARTIN / javiermontoromartin.com
L I L I A N P T ÁČE Kl i l i a n p t a c e k . c o m
J AV I E R M O N T O R Oj a v i e r m o n t o r o m a r t i n . c o m
L I L I A N P T ÁČE Kl i l i a n p t a c e k . c o m
J AV I E R M O N T O R Oj a v i e r m o n t o r o m a r t i n . c o m LILIAN PTÁCEK / lilianptacek.comˇˇ
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EV
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