As I ask you to Focus on - Paintings about David Bowie
I have recently considered the validity of making some
telephone paintings in the vein of Maholy Nagy as a means of exploring Art in
the age of Mechanical reproduction. This is still a salient text but the title
is anachronistic. I mean it implies some kind of delay whereas now the
dissemination of an image is instant. Also with the arrival of the meme we have
managed to weave our over awareness of imagery into language itself. This is
Derrida’s idea of the trace gone literally mad if madness is life led by neurosis.
I mention this because I think it get me close to the reasons I make paintings
in oil on canvas, which in a chronological sense are even more anachronistic. It
is understandable that people believe
that progress means that using a certain look of painting is not valid as a
serious art form because its “been done before”. Sometimes we are more
comfortable with a deliberately mechanistic strategy, which unmasks the fake
universality of the individual mark of expression. My gut feeling is that we should
get over this but that doesn’t stand up in the court of art. The idea with my
painting is at least partially that there are still nuances of innovation to be
explored within the painted language, which may lead to a liberation from the
loss of meaning we experience and chose to fill with fear, anger, desire, hate,
confusion, frustration, alienation and so on and so on. Picasso removed the
sailor from les Demoiselles D’Avignon instinctively to make the work function
on a totemic level. To imbue it with a self sufficient power in much the same
way that the African carvings that inspired it resonate within the culture they
were made within. The point here though is that placenta of western art had
become separated from the wall of the womb and les Demoiselle was a one off
which really did join art and life. However, this particular attribute of the
painting was not what changed art but rather the breaking of the picture plain
gave rise to Analytical Cubism as rationality got back in the driving seat
(progress).
I am interested in deliberately making art that fosters an
anecdote and the sharing of stories. This is not because I want to be a story
teller but because I am not convinced by the idea that Art should be
self-sufficient. Art in its inspired exhilarated form does not happen in a
linear fashion so why should it be experienced in this way. Is it a homage to
the pilgrim who approaches the icon with head bowed in a vacuum of reverence?
This idea choses to over look that the pilgrim knew exactly what she was
looking at and all the resonances around the image because it was still
attached to the wall of the cultural womb. I’m not interested in how
commodification has separated art from function because this is not a creative
line of enquiry. However, the most famous contemporary work does seem to be
attached to the cultural wall of commerce. It is generally work that resonates
with the idea of cultures centrifugal energy around finance that gets the most
attention.
My show of paintings made around the idea of David Bowie’s
Life on Mars were about creating an atmosphere of shared experience and
resonances. Admittedly some of them are more specialist than others as having
grown up with a father who painted and taught art my relationship to painting
is very personal. These narratives are not overt in the works because I want
there to be space for shared experience. My paintings of an abstract nature are
on one hand an attempt to make some art that I would like to see. Something
that reveals the individuals nuanced relationship to skill and material without
trying to hide this in a mechanised process or overt displays of virtuosity. You
might look at my collection of representational work and semi-abstract
paintings as a puzzle, which is only correct if you see poems and songs as
things to be decoded (which I don’t). This brings me to the nub of what brought
me to the keyboard. Am I trying to explain myself? I’m trying not to be in a
position of explaining myself because this undermines the all-at-onceness of my
doctrinal stance. I want to make work that I respond to along with the viewer
(I recently told my painting father that at some point I always see painting
like reading tea leaves, you have to imagine that your own work is really
trying to tell you something). This position is a challenge to explain and I
think I came closer to seeing its outline in the introduction to a book about
The Beatles. This would make sense because music and (Beatles) records played
an enormous part in how I learnt to make a cohesive idea of life. In Revolution
in the Head Ian Macdonald describes Lennon and McCartney as “instinctive rather
than rational, as artists” who rather than making songs with a sustained line
of thought wrought them in a “collage spirit”. I am sure that this mode of
thought is one I have absorbed as an elemental starting point for a group of
works. It makes no sense to me to not have paintings that are outwardly
dissimilar because I am interested in making a show not a style. A show is
about “participation mystique” not entertainment for the sake of it. This
connection to the primitive brain via “participation mystique” is what made the
Beatles so popular. I thought about how the Beatles were careful to make lyrics
that allowed the song to flow rather than demonstrate insight or intelligence.
The second revelation from Revolution in the Head comes from
Macdonald’s deft skewering of the Post Modern idiom. I think it is particularly
relevant in a book about the Beatles because they drew on so many sources with
an innocence that prevented the bind weed of appropriation strangling the
loving feeling. When starting out on my research I spent a few months both
enjoying Derrida’s insight but developing a sense of misgiving at the grip its
overly specific interpretation had developed on our culture. Macdonald
describes a “malignant rot” (p.33), which had “spread through the western mind
since the mid- seventies: the virus of meaninglessness”. He goes on to explain
so effectively the rise of cultural relativism through the popularity not of
Derrida but because the essence of Deconstruction suiting the trash aesthetic
of the media and the philistinism of Essex Man. And so here I hope we find
ourselves back at Life on Mars and David Bowie. For the story I told myself and
tried to test the veracity of through my paintings was that David Bowie had
infected himself with this virus so that we, his acolytes may catch a glimpse
of freedom from Anomie and the symptoms of this virus of meaninglessness.
Returning to anecdote I was tempted to state that my
paintings were haunted by the story that David Bowie might have become a
painter had he not been a pop performer. But to say these semi-abstract images
were his would have been trite and missing the point. However, the white space
in the life on Mars video makes a perfect point about the terror of the blank
canvas and the idea of infinity. I love how it illustrates the anomie of the
song without being literal. This was the starting point for the paintings
directly of him. My stream of consciousness paintings were a deliberate attempt
to cut my way through a self-grown thicket of meaninglessness. This is their
relationship. It also turns out that Bowie’s frst acting job was in the role of
a young man who steps out of a painting to haunt the artist who painted it.
Even more aptly it’s called “the Image”. The cover to Heroes was inspired by this 1917 painting named Roquairol by
German artist Erich Heckel. Bowie said that Heckel was a big influence
on him as a painter, which reveals yet another persona somewhat hidden from the
mainstream media.
The point here being that as an Absurdist I return often to
the idea of synchronicty and backwards causality not that my
paintings are an attempt to reference Bowie’s love of Heckel. My paintings do look sort of old fashioned but I'm interested in trying to be culturally relevant through personal endeavour and
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