Status and the professional class

 

    The Doubter, watercolour, 2012 

A wonderfully vindictive passage from Dickens in Our Mutual Friend, Chapter X, A Marriage Contract, describes the bridegroom who makes his living by investing his property in shares: "Where does he come from? Shares. Where he is going to? Shares. What are his tastes? Shares. Has he any principles? Shares. What squeezes him into Parliament? Shares. Perhaps he of himself never achieved success in anything, never originated anything, never produced anything! Sufficient answer to all: Shares. O mighty Shares!  To set those blaring images so high and to cause us small vermin, as under the influence of henbane or opium, to cry out night and day, 'Relieve us of our money, scatter it for us, buy us and sell us, ruin us, only we beseech ye take rank among the powers of the earth, and fatten on us!'"

Dicken's venom against the non-professional middle class seems particularly deep veined in this his last completed novel.  This little passage might speak powerfully to our embittered times,but elsewhere in the novel the overblown ridicule he bears upon the bourgeoisie is so cartoonish as to no longer function well as satire.  Rather it turns attention round upon Dickens himself.  The bile of his ridicule leaves a nasty taste, however much one sympathises with the rage he bears against those insoucient accumulators of wealth, power and influence.  His contempt is expressed, it seems to me, most forcefully towards poor aesthetic taste, this being a metaphor for moral deficit, or lack of imagination about or care for the plight of others in need.  This metaphorical connection is an imaginative construction, but not an obvious truth:  heightened aesthetic taste does not necessarily go in hand with a social conscience.

The use of such a metaphor might perhaps reflect upon the competition for status between those upstarts who have easily won investment capital and those that struggle for hard-earned intellectual or creative capital.  If so, it may shed light on Dicken's personal anxiety about attaining respectable social position.  Perhaps one of the worst crimes of the C19th nouveau riche was that they did not follow the example of the old aristocracy in seeking a display of magnificence through patronage of the creative and intellectual arts, one that bestowed glory upon those creative entrepreneurs who won favour.  The indifference of the more pragmatic nouveau riche obliged the creative sector to invent new methods of promoting their special status, one achieved elegantly by the next generation following on from Dickens in the invention of the 'avant-garde'.  But this is extensively and subtly explored in David Trotter's 'Paranoid Modernism' (Oxford 2001).  

Meanwhile, Dickens is always a wonderful read: it is always somewhat astonishing to discover in good C19th novels how issues of capitalism that are still relevant are portrayed with such clarity. 

A cobweb of thought

 

Little Slaughter, Three Graces Masked, 2012

I don’t need Barthes, Derrida, Lacan et al. to spell out how every rationale is the outcome of many little slaughters carried out in the attempt to make some sort of coherent sense.  This morning I was considering how laboriously I struggle even to identify the real difficulty I am trying to resolve.  A spider was building a web on the external corner of my kitchen window and I thought a spider's web is a good metaphor for the process.

First of all you have the supports from which the spider must hang its web - these are the fundamentals which you normally take for granted - say, for example: 'art is a valuable activity'  - but which suddenly seem less solid when you start hanging the sling of your web to them (what is being valued, exactly, by whom and on what grounds?!!!).  When these supports shake a little, your thoughts go wondering up and down trying to identify the structural weakness.  It inevitably leads you away on tangents, which eventually, how every fascinating you find them, have to be stripped out.

Secondly, you start stringing together the main lines of your web - what strands are you bringing to your question and are they really relevant?  You only know once you start bearing stress upon them: if they don't hold you have to start all over, yet again.

Then you continue cross weaving, trying to string your sentences together into a cohesive whole.  The pattern is too complex: you have been running too many strands: they might all be important to you but are not to the point.  So you edit and reassemble the structure, and have a rest and wonder whether the web will hold even over one night's sleep!

Next day, you look to see if you have caught the fly.  No?  Did it slip away amongst all those deleted paragraphs?

Masked

, 

Three Graces Masked, watercolour, 2012



I remember reading a good book years ago that owed its main perspective to  Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation". Unfortunately, I can't recall the title or author, but the book explained very powerfully how the seamless simulation of reality we experience daily on TV, for instance, creates a reflective surface, like a mirror, which prevents us apprehending the actuality beneath, behind or beyond.  It likened the simulacrum to a surviving twin, the other entombed in the womb. The Chicago School of Media Theory website says "It is only when the viewer of the simulacrum penetrates the surface that he can tell that it differs from the thing it imitates."  Magritte proposed this pretty well, I believe, in his painting “The Human Condition”, painted as long ago as 1934!

That was prior to the pervasive intrusion of the internet upon our lives and the constant streaming of video and photographic material. Increasingly we know about the world via the deadening illumination of the screen, the surface of which becomes invisible when operative and cannot therefore be penetrated by the simulation displayed.  The performances are intuitively ‘live’ - we may observe their replication on our screen shortly if not minutes after the event - and it is hard to resist the impression that we are actually witness to the original in space and time.

Contemporary artists working in video do successfully challenge the apparent replication of life via the screened imagery by disrupting its seamlessness and thereby reminding the viewer to be conscious of its artificiality and question its 'reality' or 'truth'.  Yet, personally, even though I find such theoretical exercise intriguing in brief doses, I absolutely hate those blacked out holes in galleries where one is subject to tedious minutes of ‘challenging’ video experience. It is as if fine art has fled from competition with rival producers of imagery in the creative industries and secured itself within its academic citadel, drawn down the blinds, pulled up the drawbridge and thrown away the key!  There is nothing to do but obsess over its demise.  In trying to hone itself down to the 'pure' kernel of sigificance, it has gone about anaestheticizing, amputating, deskilling, reducing, reducing, until there is little left!

When it comes to interpreting the world in an intelligible and beautiful manner, one is tempted to look not at the work of 'fine artist's but that of those artists who produce the computer simulations with which science delights both eye and mind.   In astronomy, such images are often awe inspiring -, surely one of the prime tasks traditionally assigned to the 'fine arts'. How refreshing is the unselfconscious aestheticism applied to these simulations: but I suppose it is the age old format: when form meets function, beauty follows. We know they are artificial images but we understand the artificiality and how we can use it to read and marvel at the information coded into the image.

The printmaker Jude Lockie recently lent me "Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps" by Tzvetan Todorov.  In his section entitled "Life of the Mind" Todorov enquires into forms of intellectual and aesthetic morality in the Soviet and Nazi camps.   Todorov's analysis of witness from those who experienced the camps is richly multi-layered but coherent. Perpetrators and victims alike valued the arts, both as practitioners and audience: there is no given morality in engagement with the life of the mind.  Nor can a discussion of ethics in those circumstances be about traditional moralising, or about justice.  It is about individual moral choice, one where the virtues of heroism are relevant, but not more than the ‘ordinary’ virtues of caring, dignity and empathy, the giving of self in face to face encounters with others, and accepting the risk of doing so. To try and précis this subtle, questioning text would be to do it injustice, suffice to say that it is immensely thought provoking and it sheds a sorry light, I propose, on some of the occasionally complacently ironic masks with which the supposedly self-challenging gaze of postmodernism has been diverted. 

The Ever-Adaptable Office Worker, card and wire construction, 56cm height, 2012

This sculpture has three different faces as you walk round.  It's made using recycled materials that an office administrator will be handling - the cardboard boxes that the stationery comes in, old files and so on.  It is in homage to Diane at Great Yarmouth Museums who I observed calmly adapting to the constantly changing duties of her role as administration assistant, a recycling of skills and abilities in adapting to new processes, new systems, new structures.  Such people manage to retain warmth and stability within the modern office, thanks to their competence gilded with humour and remarkable good will, but the sculpture is not a portrait except in the most cartoonish manner: it is meant as a wry comment on the constant restructuring that goes on within organisations, the transient or fragmentary nature of contemporary working life!

The piece was selected for the Great Yarmouth Art Festival's visual art exhibition SPAN, held in September at Great Yarmouth Minster and curated by Rebecca Weaver.

Phoebe, commissioned full size figure

Phoebe, commissioned work, direct cement on wire mesh, 180cm height, 2012

I have been working on this commission for a year - the clients have been very patient.  There weren't enough funds for a bronze cast from an original modelled in clay or plaster, so this method of building the figure in wire mesh and rendering directly in cement was agreed.  It meant avoiding the problematic weakness of seams in a cement cast with a mould taken from an original modelled in clay. 

I started with drawings exploring ideas for the pose based on the specific location, then 20cm maquettes modelled in wax based on the drawings that the client preferred.  From the selected maquette, I first made a half size version of the figure, testing out the design for the armature and my method of working.  I have to admit I found this process pretty daunting to contemplate - there is no time to make any significant modifications once the cement is applied, and it has to be done in one go, avoiding applying a fresh mix to cement that has cured.  I was lucky to have a good friend, Geoff, mixing the cement for me (2 parts sand, 1 part brick dust), which enabled me to work quickly without interruptions.  Thanks Geoff!

Balsa Wood

Standing Figure with Bird, wire and balsa wood, 86x20x19cm, 2012.
I am exhibiting this sculpture in the forthcoming Halesworth Arts Festival exhibition at The Cut (4th -28th October), along with some other sculptures constructed in the same materials and with the same method.  Namely, this involves fixing two aluminium rods to a base, bending them to the initial lines of a standing posture and then starting to draw in some planes with balsa wood strips, shaped to create movement across the form.  It's not as immediate as using card which I can bend into large sweeping shapes, creating a dynamic whole with a few simple elements.  But it has the advantage of being light and durable, and reflects the light beautifully across its fractured planes.

It is liberating drawing in space with these light, tough materials, so easy to shape after struggling against the heavy wetness of clay which strives always to sink back towards the earth from where it came.  The clay figures demand far greater commitment, as they must be coherent from within the core, suggesting an interior life which emanates outwards into every plain, every detail.  The quality of this inwardness is all, and that is what is so challenging - what is it one wants to say with this innerness, this subjectivity of mortal, vulnerable flesh inhabited by an imperfect consciousness?  No such problems with the balsa wood and wire constructions, thanks to the constructional nature of the materials, they fly free of resolution.  The making process itself, the will to propose, is their substance.