The Printmaker’s Art

Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn) (1606 – 1669)

Christ Crucified between the Two Thieves: 'The Three Crosses' c.1660

Drypoint and burin on paper: 38.50 x 45.00 cm

A new show at the National Gallery of Scotland opened last weekend. The exhibition is an understated affair, as is so often the way with prints. It is to be found downstairs at the back of the gallery in a small room which even the invigilator I asked had troubles locating. Actually he looked at me blankly, this clearly is not a show expected to pull in the punters. And yet the exhibition’s understatement belies the magnificence of some of the thirty or so prints on display here. The selection comes from the gallery’s extensive print collection and the curatorial idea behind the exhibition is simple and deliberate. The images are presented as ‘icons’, examples of some of the top hitting prints in the history of art, both beautiful and technically masterful. If these were paintings we’d be calling the exhibition a blockbuster. But they’re not, and it is not, and I must admit I am grateful for it as I had the room to myself for almost the entirety of my time there. The exhibition races through history without slavishly observing a chronological ordering, ranging from examples by Beccafumi (one of my personal favourites) to D Y Cameron, from Dürer through to Rembrandt, from Hogarth to Toulouse-Lautrec. It’s a whistle stop tour but the quality of each print can stand it. Despite their diminutive size you can’t take them in in one quick glance (mentally ticking them off from your list of great art to see), not really, there is too much there. Good prints such as these, with their detail and dexterity clearly yet unassumingly present, require a slower pace. Their intimacy makes the viewing experience far more personal and lasting, the lights are dimmed, the room quiet. It would be rude not to give them time, reflecting the slow paced build up such images took to construct in the first place (seven years in Rembrandt’s case).

The range of printmaking techniques and atmospheres achieved is impressive. And, I know you’ve heard it all before but they really have to be seen up close like this to be believed. Claude Mellan’s famous ‘The Sudarium of Saint Veronica’ is breathtaking, simple in conception yet highly complex in execution. The whole image is realised though a single line that grows from the middle of the print and then spirals outwards. The line expands and contracts to denote darker or lighter areas of detail of Christ’s image superimposed on the undulating veil. This could be merely a novelty piece for present day viewers but it is genuinely mesmerizing, its optical dizzying akin to a classic 19960s Bridget Riley painting. Wenceslaus Hollar’s ‘The Realms of Juno, Pallas and Venus’ are executed with characteristic precision through the play of shadows and highlights and in the threads of fabric. They compare wonderfully with Whistler’s more rough approach in his melancholic etching of Venice called ‘Nocturne: Palaces’. Here indistinct forms suggest crumbling out of focus buildings, watery reflections and shadowy corners through fine sketchy and scratchy cross-hatched lines. It is all very tactile stuff.

In fact it was intriguing to note just how sculptural these images appeared. This is partly, no doubt due to the nature of the process of printmaking which involves removing (either through carving, roughing up, delicate incisions or dissolution by acid) areas of the plate upon which the image is initially described, before being transferred to paper. Imagine this plate as a reusable form-giving cast pressed tight against the paper to give shape to an impression. But even in the finished prints evidence of the built up process of layering and construction is still there. In the case of ‘The Lost Receipt’ by Sir David Wilkie this is overtly presented through the display of two impressions at different stages of the image making process. In Rembrandt’s etching of ‘Christ Crucified between the Two Thieves: The Three Crosses’ the overlay of lines upon lines, stage upon stage, is clear. The image is made of various rhythms and depths of mark. They range from the lighter areas in the centre around Christ where figures are sketchily conceived, to the left third which appears murky where the outlines of horses and figures are thick and blurry, to the dark strip down the right side of the image that acts almost like a veil obscuring the layers of marks below.

This exhibition succeeds partly because of its compelling array of prints but also because of its simplicity. It does not obscure the objects by impenetrable technical terminology or didactic historical detail. Such approaches all too often see prints stifled by a structure for viewing which can seem incomprehensible to the unaccustomed. Here however grants its prints the space to be viewed as aesthetic images in their own right allowing us to make our own connections. These connections for me are curiously apposite to concerns one can readily identify in art now and in the second half of the last century. Such concerns favour ambiguity and incompleteness of form. Beccafumi’s near abstractions depicting the alchemist Vulcano at work, for example, or Whistler’s ghostly architectural forms clearly appeal to such a contemporary aesthetic. But even the most highly defined and precisely delineated print style like Hollar’s depend equally on ‘very imperfect resemblance’ in Descarte’s words.1 After all working within the relative restrictions of available printing techniques (which for a long time were based largely on a palette of dots, lines and perhaps washes) the power of suggestion rather than completion is paramount. Printed images are after all impressions defined by their partiality, as much by what is not there as by what is. That is to say their form comes about largely through the methodical obliteration of surface. These distant semblances of what they represent act as a catalyst for the viewer to imagine the rest. Much of the responsibility for building and completing the work is offered out to the viewer. What could be more post-modern than that? Equally the interest in revealing visual ancestries of a single piece of work, how a work is made, is rampant in todays art world. Think of ‘Blotter’ painted in 1993 by Peter Doig, which relies on a crucially perceptible slow build up of drawings, photocopies, prints and layers like of paint, like visual residue. Or what about Jorge Otero-Pailos’ 2009 latex cast of a crumbling Venetian wall which reveals the drawn out pitted deterioration of a surface by natural elements.

The narrative arc presented in the exhibition is straightforward and yet entirely satisfying in its subtlety. I have to commend the curatorial tactic here which somehow manages to reflect the suggestiveness and receptiveness of the prints themselves. Hannah Brocklehurst, its curator, has taken a step back. Boldly and refreshingly she has let the work speak for itself and trusted the viewer to think and look for herself too. It pays off. It offers a great introduction to some fabulous prints - a medium largely under-exhibited, under studied and over looked - and for the those for whom prints are old hat, perhaps it is a little frustrating in its sweeping overview, but you can never tire of looking at a great print.

The Printmaker’s Art is on display at The National Gallery of Scotland until 23rd May. Admission is free.

1 René Descartes, ‘Discours quatriesme: Des sens en general’, La Dioptrique in Discours de la methode pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la verité das les sciences, 1637, ed. Jean-Robert Armogathe et al., Paris, 1987, pp. 101-2 also quoted in Wiliam B. MacGregor, ‘The Authority of Prints: An Early Modern Perspective’, Art History, Vol. 22, No 3, September, 1999, pp. 391-3.

What has happened to museum wall texts?

A long time ago, before I started looking at art with any intent, I vaguely remember seeing something at the Tate and being interested enough to look at the accompanying wall text for further elucidation, perhaps confirmation of whatever I had been thinking as I was looking. The memory is all very hazy in my mind now but I remember with a great deal of clarity that upon reading the text I felt utterly deflated and offended both by it and, as a consequence, the art. The text offered an iconographic reading of the work which purported to tell me that a) symbolised b) and that b) referred to event c) in the artist's life in the most as if that were the end of the story. I swiftly turned my back and moved on. This memory has never left me, however clouded by time it has become. I don't even remember what the art was, selective memory is a powerful thing. But I have never been able to forgive iconographic, symbolic, intentionalist or overly reductive readings of art and yet that is the mode by which the vast majority of wall texts in museums and galleries are written. I find them, for the most part, intellectually both patronizing and debilitating as their explanations for why a piece of art should be as it is or look as it does, for what art's effects might be, are played out on completely depersonalized terms. They are presented as if unquestionable absolutes, like objective facts. Who are you to tell me what to think anonymous wall text?

This is no small matter, for in a museum or gallery context the issue of informational wall texts has become key to the presentation of material to the general public. They are not just an aside. In fact people, especially if unfamiliar or unsure of the artwork before them will spend more time reading the texts than they will looking at the work itself. It has become something of an interpretative crutch for the unaccustomed or even lazy eye. Towards the end of an extended gallery visit I often find myself spending more time reading and less time looking.

Given the placement of these small unassuming texts, on the wall in direct correlation to artworks, they surely deserve a good deal more thinking about than they are currently given. The question becomes first of all one of content. What should these texts contain? Should it be a straight title, date, artist, artist's dates, materials and dimensions? Should the text attempt to explain the work, to extrapolate the kind of issues that the work might be deemed to be grappling with? Should some kind of historical contextualization be offered? Whatever the nature of the content it is clear that these wall texts have the power and authority to suggest interpretative and methodological ways into the works in question. That's no mean feat. They are like 50 word intellectual frameworks for the work displayed. Bland, non-committal, poorly written or indecipherable tags simply will not do. We and the art they attempt to shed light on, deserve better.

At the Phoenix Gallery in Exeter a recent show of characteristically small paintings by Lara Viana appeared with no explanatory wall texts to accompany each painting at all. An almost mystically vague wall text appeared by way of introduction to the artist and the show but apart from the paintings the walls appeared bare. The lack of wall text was refreshing. In fact given the intimate, small scale nature of Viana's work, its relationship with text would have been problematic purely on the basis of scale and focus. The text would have been far too distracting to any spectator. Nonetheless the decision to omit text from the gallery walls was a brave one given on the one hand the context of the particular gallery (it is a publicly funded arts centre and not a highbrow avant-guard establishment) and given the current mission to educate via museums and galleries. Of course there were also sheets with minimum details (dates and titles) and a specially commissioned piece of art writing which you could choose to refer to. The lack of text was an interesting experiment though the gallery has not continued in that vein for its subsequent shows. Neither can I see major museums and galleries losing their wall texts all together so what other directions could these texts take other than the current prevailing tone that is 'so reductive, so intellectually unambitious, so badly written, and so physically intrusive that they feel less like the handiwork of Jeeves than of some shambling Igor?' as Thomas Morton put it.

It's all very well being critical of the general state of wall texts but the offer of a more constructive alternative might be valuable. I take as an example a text from a recent exhibition of prints (etchings and engravings) that I curated for the University of Bristol.

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Lambert Suavius 1510–1574/6 (Flemish)

The Entombment 1548

Engraving, 21.4 x 17.5 cm

This image shimmers with detail: in Christ’s beard; in the irregular masonry around the arched opening to the cave; and in the weeds which grow in the cracks of the stone, and which sometimes cast a shadow.

Shadow functions to contextualise the action within the cave. The framing walls of the cave are dark and unforgiving, challenged most strongly by the small square window in the right hand wall that bleeds sunshine directly onto Christ’s reclining body. Here shadow is mostly tonal, giving the figures a sense of volume. Suavius uses cast shadows more sparingly and often in fragments, like the intriguing one that cuts down through the centre of the forearm of the female figure holding Christ’s feet. The artist does not keep pedantically to a logical projection of shadow and light, but allows a playful visual eye and a narrative thread to dictate the shaded forms of the print.

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Such an impressionistically guiding description is enjoyable to read and is suggestive in its own way but perhaps wall texts could go a step further? In such a context is there scope for considered personal reaction to a piece of work? Could we, as an art viewing public, handle it? Would it be considered too much of an intrusion, perhaps even too directive and if so why? We have all heard whispers of the demise of the critic and the general suspicion of the opinions of so-called experts so would a knowledgeable response to an artwork be too much to take? This is a situation that has come about partly through an over-saturated market in arts criticism (as James Elkins took to task in the infamous 'What happened to art criticism?'). Amateur critics (in the form of bloggers say) now seem to be replacing or at least displacing the professionals (as numerous journal and newspaper articles love to point out). I am not in the business of putting professional art critics out of work (the market certainly needs a shake up but that is a matter for another time) however this justified discontent with unsatisfactory art writing seems like a good juncture to evaluate the approach to the arts that most museums and galleries express though these all-important small wall texts.

I would like to see even more personal investment in wall texts. Imagine wall texts as personal reactions to and impressions of the art to which they refer, as art's equal, rather than art's drawn out funereal march, that is something else. Imagine the mundane wall text transformed into what Gaston Bachelard has termed a 'reverberation', a manifestation of our natural proclivity to repeat, to share, to reconfigure our experience of art through words. It adds a further layer to the art, not in competition, but as an expressive form of appreciative ode to the work. Such an impression is lasting and far more worthy of our attention.

A subjective reaction is certainly less determining than a seemingly objective take on the matter of art. It recognises both its uniqueness and its foundations in the cultural baggage from which it was born. People are happy to compare personal opinions, impressions and much less happy to disagree with a presented depersonalised (symbolic, historical, political or social) 'fact', thereby stimulating silent discussion and reflection rather than smothering them. An affective response (as Peter de Bolla puts it), that is an emotional reaction to art, is something that people can uninhibitidely draw out of themselves, with practice. Though this experience is hard to verbalize or even recognize at first it certainly is not helped when people read wall texts that are written as a watertight synopses of the art in question that simply don't let you the living viewer in. Surely what a wall text should be doing is to draw the viewer closer to a work, to stimulate further independent reflection, emancipate a viewer's speculative viewing input rather than surge on as if the viewer had nothing of worth to give. Wall texts should offer doubts rather than resolutions, possibilities rather than 'truths'. The 50 word wall text should surely not have the last word. It should aim to empower the viewer to come to his or her own pondered conclusions, as an extra spark rather than the cinders.

Selected Bibliography

Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969

Elkins, James, What Happened to Art Criticism?, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003

de Bolla, Paul, Art Matters, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2001

Morton, Thomas 'The Wrong Words' Frieze issue 124 Summer 2009

Lloyd, Lizzie, 'Picturing Subjective Art Histories: The Accumulative Eye in Peter Doig', MA Thesis, University of Bristol, 2009

The Substance of Shadows

My print exhibition opened this summer on June 6th on the occasion of a conference entitled 'The Stephen Bann Effect' to celebrate Stephen Bann's substantial impact on the state of Art History today. The show will be up for a year and can be found at 43 Woodland Road in the Resource Centre in the Department of History of Art at Bristol University.

Here is a taster of my ideas behind the exhibition:

The Substance of Shadows: Prints, Shadows and Memory

The Substance of Shadows is an exhibition drawn from the Department of History of Art’s print archive. The archive is characteristic of the varied, eccentric and often serendipitous nature of print collecting. Whether the prints are sought, found by chance or donated, they tell a particular tale about the accumulative process of collecting, of the organisation of memories into histories.

The six prints exhibited are in many ways disparate, spanning two centuries, produced for different purposes and varying in subject matter and style. Yet they have one thing in common: shadows. Ranging from strong cast shadows to delicate tonal shading, from the dark and the harrowing to the understated and idiosyncratic, shadows add visual and emotional resonance to the images. They may be used to convey the illusion of space and volume or to imply a particular narrative by symbolic association. Taken metaphorically as imperfect cast repetitions, shadows can be understood as analogies for the technical process of print production and for the creative mechanisms of making and disseminating memory.

As echoes of an original, shadows, prints and memories have an ambiguous relationship with their source (whether a solid object, artwork, printing block, or experience). They are defined by the aura of their source, in relation to which they are inextricably linked and yet physically separate. The transformative effect of repetition causes shifts in meaning and interpretation. The shadow has been thought of as a ‘double’, sometimes less than a detailed reflection, at others more revealing of the true, often malignant, essence of the object or person by which it is cast. The inexact reproduction of a printed image, and its distribution, allows a single copy to be viewed in relation to an infinite array of other images. A memory sees an experience imperfectly repeated and reconstructed by the subconscious. It is fundamentally affected by other memories we accrue over the years. As replicas of something else, shadows, prints and memories take on a life of their own through their dissemination and rearrangement in other contexts, combinations and collections. By nature suggestive and incomplete, these impressions intensify with the defining inflection of life lived, time passed, art and images seen, juxtaposed and reconfigured.

Photographs of the prints in situ and the accompanying catalogue (beautifully designer by Wilf Whitty at Radio Type) to follow.

No need to shout...

Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie: Class Hegemony in Contemporary Art currently running at the Arnolfini at Bristol’s dockside, is the latest installment of a project that has already shown in London, Stockholm and Cairo. The basic premise of the exhibition is to question and reveal the exploitative nature of the artworld and the ways that it is still dominated by a certain social strata based on economic prosperity and I suppose, cultural education.

Many of the works are performative in nature using actors to play out a given role. In Neil Cummings’ version of the TV show ‘Faking It’, for example, a café waiter is set the challenge of trying to fool the panel of experts, an art critic, a curator and an artist, into believing he is a real practicing artist. Hassan Khan’s photographic and textual documentation in Decoy works on a similar level. Four actors were used to infiltrate, ‘fake it’, at an exclusive Stockholm private view. Excerpts of dialogue that takes place between the actors and the ‘genuine’ private view attendees are reproduced in texts. They are meant, it seems, to expose art world pretense and artificiality as when, the curator of a new East London Gallery, is caught declaring outright to one of the actors that he wants to seek out artists to show in his gallery early in their careers ‘before they have established themselves, then they’re much easier to shape’. Such notions of curators, critics, buyers and gallerists ‘making’ artists and the power game that that entails is clearly riling for artists yet the vitriol with which Khan expresses this annoyance seems slightly at odds with the fact that he is after all still here, still working as an artist as part of a curated mainstream touring exhibition.

Natasha Sadr Haghighian’s I Can’t Work Like This, is for me, one of the more successful and complete pieces both conceptually and aesthetically. Indeed where other works have shied away from clearly aesthetic concerns, no doubt because of its assumed alliance with traditional conservative and right wing sensibilities, Haghighian creates a work that is both thought provoking and equivocal. Nails have been hammered into the walls of the gallery, they are all bent this way and that by the imprecise force of their driving blows. They form a dense grey cloud on the wall of the gallery (made all the more interesting by the various shadows that are cast by the overhead spot lighting) in the middle of which clearings of exposed white wall form the words I CAN’T WORK LIKE THIS in crisp block capital letters. On the floor underneath two hammers lie strewn along with a scattering of un-bent nails and their now empty container. But what are we to make of all this? Unlike the more vocal components of the exhibition this piece welcomes a little more thinking and looking on the part of the viewer, a little more deciphering. For me the nails resemble a swarm of people seen from above, surrounding and quite literally describing the stenciled letters. They are bent over, as if crippled by the force of the blows which they have undergone, and yet they remain just about standing, a humble yet vital part of the artwork.

San Keller’s photographs of how parents display their offspring’s work also manages to get further than mere shouting about the injustices of the art system. The interesting idiosyncrasies and sometimes incongruities of artworks displayed in domestic contexts opens up a variety of questions about what art means in a world wider in scope than elitist art circles. Art becomes more human, less imperialist and demanding outside of the gallery space. The images are devoid of human presence except for their multi-layered traces, their semi-private accumulations and arrangements of stuff, their personal histories. Curiously at once banal, witty and loaded, artworks sit alongside every day objects perhaps offering some kind of insight into where the artist came from, if that matters, if you’re interested. When the domestic world is then introduced into the gallery in the form of photographic representation the issues become even more entangled. In a show about what and who ‘makes’ or can make an artist the introduction of parentage is telling indeed. Are links being drawn between parent and curator with the implication that at some point you need to ‘go your separate ways’ for personal growth? What I like about this and Haghighian’s piece is that they are thoughtful, quietly unassuming and lasting. They are works that suggest ways in which they might be read without forcing themselves into a single and unequivocal self-reflexive dead-end.

The issue of spectatorship also slips into this exhibition. There is a feeling of uneasiness as the viewer, especially in the role of art critic, becomes complicit in the morally questionable economic system by which the art world is organised and the hierarchies of power that play out behind the scenes. Our mere presence in the gallery space means that we implicitly accept the terms by which art is made and displayed. Art as a physical commodity is not only sought by buyers both private and public but it also provides its own intellectual and cultural currency, its own kudos for the culturally aspirational. To be a ‘gallery-goer’ means inclusion and acceptance. The art world has always thrived on exclusivity either in terms of those who can afford, to buy or make art or volunteer in galleries or subsist on the mostly low wages of art institutions or write about art for a living. With so many jostling nonetheless to be a part of this club, founded on such laughably archaic modes of conduct, no wonder its effects are so far reaching. Still set upon an imaginary plinth, teasing us with the possibility of national and personal cultural betterment, art it seems has the power to affect far and wide.

Nevertheless this exhibition as a whole feels slightly mechanical. It is a bombardment, an unabashed rant at the art-world to which all of these artists, showing in mainstream public art galleries are of course indebted. This irony is not lost on the artists I am sure but the sense of disgruntlement is so potent, the political, social and cultural message so unsubtle I am inclined to remind myself of Irit Rogoff’s thought that ‘art does not have to be overtly political in its subject matter in order to produce a political effect, thus constituting a politics rather than reflecting one’.1 I am left feeling unsatisfied by, ironically given a recurring theme of the exhibition, a sense of over-curation in this group show, it all feels over-determined. The fact that art is still to a high degree the reserve of the economically prosperous is, of course, shameful. But the exhibition’s rallying thematic, with the thumbs down to the bourgeoisie, risks suffocating the more nuanced works, such as Haghighian’s or Keller’s, by its single minded intent. It is as if the message came first and the art, an auxillary second, a means of demonstration.

1. Irit Rogoff, ‘Looking Away: Participations in Visual Culture’ in Gavin Butt, After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance, Oxford: Blackwell, 2005, pp. 121–122

Suspension at the Phoenix Gallery, Exeter

‘Suspension’, the current exhibition at the Phoenix Gallery, Exeter, sees a maturing of work by the duo Simon Haddock and Stuart Chubb. An explosive formation lures us in, part temple, part labyrinth, part magic portal. Seemingly precarious in its configuration, like a three-dimensional Russian modernist montage, Viewer consists of thin wooden walls upon which stand further sheets of wood that overlap, hang and balance horizontally, then grow vertically up in a wooden landscape construction site, barely visible from the gallery floor. Wood juts and looms, creating a space that is at once confusing and arresting it its disarray. It is interactive, but gives no clear sense of where we should begin our explorations. At every turn our impression is framed by windows teasingly opening out at every level. Teasingly, because our experience of the piece separates the physical and the visual, our physical entrance is at once invited and blocked, our visual involvement authorized and restricted. Our engagement is playful. We crouch, peek, tip-toe, look through, crane. It is fragmented, denied a sweeping view except perhaps at the gateway on the other side of the ‘portal’ (access to which is frustratingly denied). Here we happen upon the suggestion of a reconstruction of the artists’ studio where further ‘discarded’ wood and images lie scattered. Is it the studio or is it a mental picture of the process of art making, where disjointed elements and experiences are appropriated, rejected and then rearranged into some kind of narrative?

Viewer

The wall text informs us that the artists are working predominantly with the debris of ‘false walls’ from temporary exhibitions, amassed and reconfigured. These discarded supports, within which art has previously been hung, projected or framed, define the spatial structure of our viewing experience within a gallery. Haddock and Chubb deconstruct and reconstruct, subvert and embellish such physical demarcations. And yet the narrative they present is hardly complete: just in case we have not noticed, they leave the G-clamps for all to see. Is it in the process of making or dismantling? (If postmodernism has taught us anything, it is to question such ‘false’ distinctions). This is surely the point. The reincarnation of fragments from now unidentifiable exhibitions can never be complete, as more shows go up and others are replaced. Ghosts of art that these sheets of wood previously housed haunt the current work, distant memories of art now evolving into something other. Haddock and Chubb’s rendering is pared down by their palette, limited to MDF laid bare, punctuated by black and white emulsion paint, slapped on. Colour is sparse, with an isolated slab of red or grey leaning here and there. It is an element of the piece which is left unexplored and seems at odds with its more lighthearted tackling of space.

Seeding (left wall) and Cadence

By contrast colour, in Haddock’s solo paintings, is activated, threatening to erupt from the surface in an explosion of trails, clouds, smudges and shadows. His work sways between a bewildering, almost violent bombardment of form and colour, and a more open landscape of looser touch and restricted palette. In Cadence, lurid painted bars clash and expand across and out from the surface in ultra- and anti-perspective, as scaffolding around which scatterings of textured marks jostle. However, on a backdrop of diaphanous yellow wash there emerges a dissonance between the romantic and the mechanical, the spectral and the sci-fi, a kind of dream-like/nightmarish construction. In another guise, Haddock’s approach is less urgent, more spacious, overtly suggestive of natural forms and rhythms. Meandering in its trajectory, Seeding builds up texture through layers of overlapping, almost translucent masked washes, exposing previous layers of drawn black scribbles. Haddock’s process is tantalizingly revealed in painterly form (as in its sculptural sister across the hall). Where he has built up pigment, the viewer is invited mentally to unmake, scrape back, an archaeology of spectatorship. The cloud of dust, birds or whatever else it might be, hovers suggestively above the scene as neither one thing nor another or both. You decide.

The painting and sculptural installation work closely together (despite the disruptive division of the gallery hallway). Structural forms are echoed, the constructive process made manifest, their connection, intimate. Beginning our viewing journey with the paintings, as we move into Haddock and Chubb’s collaborative work, we have the sense of moving into alluringly unauthorized territory. We zoom into a painting, beyond the finished product on display, and into a work in progress. It is revealing, laid bare, its ludic serendipity celebrated. Its dependence on a trail of artistic precedence is honest without a claustrophobic sense of knowingness. I am left wondering how constructive a more overt stylistic breach between their two approaches might be, and how much a loosening of the currently unified aesthetic, by pushing the very nature of the collaborative, might lead to even richer realms.

What's all this about?

By way of introduction this blog is, broadly stated, about art and visual culture. More specifically it’s about very personal and present engagements with art and spectatorship rather than a strongly historical account of works discussed. I will not be focussing on a particular period of art production or a particular genre of work but on what happens when an artwork, any artwork meets an eye, a body, a mind. I am intrigued by the difficult to articulate moment in which two entities, the viewer and the work, two sets of cultural baggage, two modes of communication meet. My accounts are deeply and unapologetically subjective informed by my personal reception of works viewed now and in the past. It’s easy to go to art exhibitions and stare and then leave again but to then attempt to put that experience into words, to describe one’s reactions, what one’s thought processes were makes that engagement far more demanding, thoughtful and lasting.

Wenceslaus Hollar: Civis Coloniensis Uxor (1643)

But why ‘The Substance of Shadows’? In the first instance it is the name of my first solo curated show for the History of Art Department at Bristol University soon to open (June 20th 2009). This exhibition displays a selection of the department’s print archive that I have been working on over the past nine months (more of this soon). But secondly it expresses the ways in which our experiences of art, literature and culture stay with us as memories, they inform everything that we subsequently do and see. They colour our interpretations of the present and future by their link to something past. I see these connections as resembling a metaphorical shadow, they have a specific source (in the form of an artwork) and yet their shaded reflection goes through something of a metamorphosis as it is transcribed from source to shadow, from artwork to the mind of the spectator. That reflected double is by no means inferior to the original, it is rather deeply effected by whatever mental reconfigurations it inevitably passes through. My own writings represent in themselves further shadows of the art I have seen and thought about, they are necessarily imperfect proliferations of their original.