At the start of his book ‘Farewell To An Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism’ the art historian T.J. Clark conducts a thought experiment; what would a future archaeologist think of works of modern art if they were to come across them a long time after some sort of Armageddon? “What forms of life would future viewers reconstruct from this material? What idea of the world’s availability to knowledge would they reckon the vanished image-makers had operated with?” Clark here is perhaps asking the question; how would future viewers think of the twentieth-century through the images people produced if those viewers had no continuity or links to the history and contexts they were produced in? An absolute stop, erasure and start again in viewing conditions. For Clark it would need some sort of Armageddon and decades or even perhaps centuries to pass for these new conditions of viewing, some sort of absolute erasure of historical knowledge. If Clark was writing this text now, this might not be needed. It is often observed that the internet can do in seconds what took years; it can wipe out history and context in the matter of swipes. Like Clarke’s future archaeologist stumbling across modernism, the internet is a trove of images where collective meaning seems absent or at least impossible to grasp.
A group of women look back at the photographer. They are all wearing plastic macs, mostly black, one in red. They have their hoods up and the only one who is not in a mac holds an umbrella. Perhaps it is raining. Perhaps they are a middle-aged walking group of women caught in the rain. But then why would one be wearing a gas-mask at the back, slightly crouched over the rest? Perhaps this is not a walking group after all. Next to this image to its right are two other images, one of two figures similarly seemingly protected against bad weather, in the fog. And an image of three brightly coloured feather-like forms, fishing tackle designed to mimic the movement of small fish to attract bigger fish. And then a fourth image, of a bunny rabbit. A first reading of this work might think of collage, a central device to modernism, from photomontage, surrealistic collage, pop and postmodern appropriation. Context is produced from other surrounding images in collage, an act the viewer makes to thread together the disparate individual images which have no anchoring aside from the title of the work; in this case, ‘Spread (Pleasure in Plastic)’.
A more careful consideration of the work produces a different reading though. The images are covered with a thin layer of textured silicone cast from leather, its small folds and irregularities making it look like skin. Visible from close up, the silicone acts to become the element that holds the different images in place. If montage depends on the juxtaposition of different visual imagery, then this is doing something different. Visually it reduces the separation of images two ways; firstly, by acting to physically bind or hold the individual together, but also secondly, to almost imperceptibly blur the images so the very surface of each becomes the same, that thin layer of silicone. It acts as some sort of collective binding, some sort of collective protection even. Like the plastic surfaces of the macs which allow pleasure and desire to be hidden under the homogenous layer of outerwear. It turns out after all, that this is no walking group.
The collaborative work of Laila Majid and Louis Blue Newby is an artistic practice of what happens underneath and what happens in between. The images in their ‘Contact’ series are paused, transported, started on again by the other, paused, transported, started on once more. It is an easy reading to say that the images, culled from fast-moving sources, the internet, the camera phone, are slowed down by this process of meticulous drawing. It is as interesting perhaps to think about the way the works come to their final, settled existence by repeatedly being deliberately paused, and re-authored. The use of the repeated line which suggests a reduction of sorts (think of its use in minimalism) disguises a deliberate, provocative plurality. Plurality disguised as singularity (that line), the heterogenous deliberately hidden. ‘Lets Clock a Gag Together’ exhorts ‘Contact (Together)’, but the joke is on the viewer; you don’t know where one ends and the other begins, you’re not going to recognise the heterogeneous, the different, if it is right in front of you.
It is a little too mechanical to say continuity disguises discontinuity in one series (‘Contact’) and discontinuity disguises continuity in the other (‘Spread’). Instead perhaps in ‘Contact’ continuity offers the almost invisible context for the heterogenous to find shelter, to be able to work simultaneously and relate to other forms of difference, to bind together modes of being lived through difference. And in ‘Spread’ interruptions, pauses and interstices are subtly brought together under an almost imperceptible layer of protective skin. This is a practice generated from the point where the continuous breaks down into the discontinuous and vice versa, it is articulate from that always unsteady point between two realities.
It is, if you like, taking Clark’s Armageddon moment and reducing it to an infinitesimally small point of the join or seam between those two states and from there crafting a response to the world of images. And this response is rooted in desire; firstly and most obviously through the nature of a number of the images themselves, culled from fetish magazines of the 1970s and 80s, such as AtomAge and Dressing for Pleasure. But as importantly the desire of the artists, in which images they choose to select to become the basis of the works. The terrifying smiles of the three mannequins in ‘Contact (Chorus)’, the magnifying glass to see things from any angle in ‘Spread (From Any Angle)’, RuPaul evenly looking back at the viewer in ‘Contact (Mother)’. Why stop swiping at these images in particular, why save them from constant circulation without context, why pause them, pass them back and forth between the duo? Perhaps because it turns looking at the ever evolving and changing archive of visual culture from a solitary pursuit (think of Aby Warburg constructing his atlas and talking of the iconology of the interval) into a permanent conversation. But also because the structure of the duo is the beginning of the structure of the dialogues and discussions that turns a group into a community, united for instance through a shared set of desires.
And then, finally, Taylor Swift. In the film ‘Inner Heat (Taylor’s Version)’, on of a series of video works shown on a single monitors that punctuate this show, we see footage of her filmed by a fan on an iPhone camera during a gig. A combination of the stadium’s floodlights, the position of the fan and the peculiarities of the phone camera mean that she is entirely blanked out as a startling white silhouette. She has become the blank space. And yet for the fan, for us the viewer, her silhouette becomes our shared space of desire, for a moment at least. And then the video cuts to black again, the pauses in it longer than the images that are fleeting. The pauses in which one can begin to articulate those shared desires, the pauses where we start to come together.
For further information please contact:
Georgia Griffiths
Georgia@niruratnam.com
