Assignment 5

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Assignment 5: curate virtual exhibition of five artists including me.

 

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Borders of Identity

 

In creating this exhibition I have employed criteria that have come from my ongoing critical engagement with my practice. I'm always asking questions of it: What am I doing? What is its place in the world? What are the characteristics of the artworks? This is an ongoing process that takes place all the time, in every decision I make, to a more, or less-conscious extent. It is a hermeneutic process that continuously informs my sense of myself as an artist. It can take a more formal turn when I write about my work as I am doing here, and elsewhere in my studio journal, but I'm conscious of its place in the way I approach individual pieces of work, individual drawings. That critical judgement, and the interpretive bias that emerges as a result of my concentrating on the things I find useful and informative to my practice exists equally in the things I choose to look at, and in the things that I read. What strikes me other's work is that which strikes a chord in my own practice, in sympathy or in contrast. The ongoing gap between what I respond to and what I do is the gap of the hermeneutic process of working-through-practice. It's why I keep doing it: there is always something un-done to respond to.

 

What I have done to create this virtual exhibition, with its intention of providing a basis for a comparative analysis in the form of a catalogue entry, is produce a number of statements about how I currently characterise my work. I've used these to select artists whose work I think reflects on some of these same criteria, either sympathetically or critically.

 

  The criteria I have employed are:

 

•     historical/literary sources- there is a use of historical/literary material or background  
•     interpretive- there is a conscious effort being made to interpret the found and historical imagery and situations  
•     gamespaces- there is a sense in which the work establishes a place of operation within which the play of the interpretation works out  
•     identity- the work deals with questions of identity: postcolonial, gender and sexuality, etc  
•     narrativity- the works use character and plot to allow meaning to unfold with the effect of narrative

 

 

The artists whose work I have chosen to explore these critera with are:

 

•     Helen Douglas: Illiers Combray  
•     Roni Horn: Doubt by Water  
•     Peter Greenaway: Luper at Compton Verney  
•     Isaac Julien: Vagabondia

 

  Finally, I have chosen my own book The Remembrancer as a representative piece of my work for comparative analysis.

 

Before discussing how these criteria or themes work across the exhibition, I will take the works one by one, saying how they feature some of the criteria, and exploring some of the links between them. The sections below are my 'catalogue entry'.

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Helen Douglas

Illiers Combray

  Helen Douglas' Illiers Combray is a long accordion-fold type book full of pictures of the countryside around the town of Illiers in France. Combray was Proust's name for the town in his celebrated extended novel À la recherche du temps perdu. Much of Proust's remembering takes place in the environs of the town, and so a trip to the real-life location (even though actually conflated with instances drawn from the real life town of Auteuil) would be a must for any devoted Proustian.

 

Douglas' work has long been concerned with notions of place, and in particular with border lands, zones of doubtful demarcation. We can take her books Wild Wood: A Border Ballad, and Unravelling the Ripple , dealing as they do, In Wild Wood's case with the wood as a metaphor for the disputed (or at any rate outlaw) history of the Border country between Scotland and England (where Douglas lives and works). The wood's untamed quality comes to represent something of the history that informs the identity of those who live there: untamed: unclassified, and carrying the influences (scars?) of historical conflicts in their nature. Unravelling the Ripple consists of images of the seashore, the zone between sea and land which teems with life that must survive across the differences offered by the twin elements. Here, too there is a zone whose definition is constantly under refision, a shifting world.

 

  Here in Illiers Combray, Douglas seems to be examining another kind of border country in tandem with Proust's own traffic between the actual and the remembered. Proust's readers encounter Proust's world at least partly through his books: they encounter books as places, and the places they visit as Proustian tourists, they encounter at least partly through the books. Our experiences are mediated through the remembrance of cultural experiences we've had, reading being one of them. That, in Douglas' own words, is why the book's visual journeys are bracketed at the begining and end by images of women reading : "I wanted to bracket my seeing, and immersion in this place through these women reading". There is a real town, Illiers, and a fictional one, Combray: the experience of one coincides partly with the experience of the other.

 

Proust's reflections are part of the subject Illiers Combray embraces. These perambulations through the town and country are marked by their reference to the real and the imaginary: in their conscious referencing of Proust, they refer to an imagined, rather than real world alonside that which actually exists. Similarly, the work exists between a present and a past time: the presence of historical stained glass figures and  tapestry testifies to the continuing presence of the past haunting the spaces the book traverses. The glass, the tapestry, the legends seem woven into the landscape which erupts into fresh spaces as if manipulated not by the rules of topography but by the metaphysical camera of reverie: here we're back with the experiences offered by Proust.

 

If Douglas' work is often about 'beating the bounds' of border spaces, there is a pathway to be trodden in such cases: through a wood or along the seashore for example. In this case we walk two 'ways': Swann's way and Guermantes' way, typified by the town and the country, and existing on either side of the long straight track of the accordion-folded book:

  "I conceived my book as a long concertina strip with two sides in reference to his [Proust's] two ways and long flowing sentences"

  Each of these walks or ruminations contain visual equivalents of what Douglas refers to as Proust's

  "embroidered effect, his interjected detail, all brilliantly observed with his eye and bodily understanding of his text.", something Douglas achieves herself in the digital interpolation of imagery woven together into one long continuous textile in which one horizon merges seamlessly with the next. Douglas explicitly acknowledges this technique of visually weaving things together in the digital medium, comparing the matrices offered by digital imagery to those offered by Jacquard looms. But there is more than visual weaving taking place: in Illiers Combray, Douglas is weaving together the real, the imaginary, the remembered in a traverse through the space and time of a book form.

I earlier referred to Douglas' bracketing of her seeing by reading: in this case, that bracketing her seeing in the remembrance of past things. Tacita Dean, writing about the experience of reading Roni Horn (the next artist to feature in this virtual exhibition), quotes Emily Dickinson's lines:

  "There is no Frigate like a book/to take us Lands away/Nor any

  Courses like a Page/Of prancing Poetry"

When we travel in a book we affect any travels we might make in real life. Can we ever experience France's Illiers for its own sake having first encountered Proust's Combray? Douglas seems to be saying that the experience is always one woven from the contradictory realities of the world and of fiction. In Roni Horn's work we will see a version of personal identity constructed from similar contradictory sources, but where Douglas shows us a narrative of different, but woven-together realities, in Horn's work meaning is always melting in and out of focus.

 

 

Roni Horn
Doubt by Water

Roni Horn's Doubt by Water consists of 30 two-sided prints mounted on aluminium stands. The prints show the face of an adolescent on one side, and water, or blocks of sea ice on the other. A stuffed owl also features. As one goes through the pictures, the obverse of the print seems to echo the gradually changing expression on the person's face. Later, the situation changes, and one is comparing the face to a slowly melting block of ice, then to the repetition of the head of a stuffed owl.

 

  Doubt by Water fits into Horn's oeuvre by way of its use of repetition, its narrative potential and its tapping in to themes of identity and change. The installation itself spills out of the rooms it's housed in, like meltwater seeping away from a central block. Who is this person whose face is repeated across these dispersed images,barely changing expression (but changing perceptibly nonetheless)? This adolescent face is probably (I think) male, but it's somewhat in doubt. Here is a person of a mutable age, whose character is still relatively unformed. Pubescent, neither a child nor an adult. The decidability of identity is as changable as the ice or the play of light across our features: it may seem sharply defined, but it melts away, it shifts, and we are left with something other than what we started with.
 
  Doubt by Water is the work of an artist who has often used books as a way of presenting her work, as in Still Water or An Index of Water. I am intrigued by the way in which she has used these stands to distribute the experience of change, repetition and metaphor across a physical space whose demarcation is uncertain, but which is activated by the presence of the pictures in the stands. What are the dimensions of the work? Unknown: the stands appear in several rooms. Is every room affected? Is there a story being told? The work wants to support some interpretation. Something appears to be happening. But what? Horn offers a distributed play on repetition, change and the metaphor of ice as an unknowable shape, always changing into flowing, changing water. Doubt by Water.

 

  Peter Greenaway

  Luper at Compton Verney

 

 

 

 

 

  Greenaway's Luper at Compton Verney is one of several manifestations of his ongoing project, the Tulse Luper Suitcases, which has so far produced three films and several exhibitions. Greenaway's ambitious plans for it include further film and television, amongst other works.

 

  The material I have chosen was an installation at Compton Verney , a large country-house gallery in Gloucestershire, which Greenaway practically filled with a selection from the 92 suitcases the work revolves around. These were accompanied by film and various sculptural manifestations.

 

The number of suitcases- 92- corresponds with the atomic mass of uranium. Greenaway has described the project as “a personal history of uranium”, or, alternatively “the autobiography of a professional prisoner”. The suitcases contain collections of objects: dolls, letters, clothing, books, etc. Many contain metaphorical elements: blood and ink, ice, and so on. The contents suggest, variously, the autobiography mentioned, and a survey of a significant part of European history ( which coincides with the emergence of the modern world through the Holocaust, the development of nuclear weapons and the global character that emerged). The continuous reconsellation of these elements made by viewing and the coincidence the viewer finds in one and another of the possible stories being constructed points to the project’s overarching form: as a system of memory. The suitcases are a mnemonic net: each fragmentary node reaches out to others in myriad combinations. In this, Greenaway’s collection resembles the table of elements: necessarily finite, but nonetheless encompassing the past and present. The suitcases also recall the many fragments of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Benjamin’s unfinished work sought to capture the vanishing world of the Parisian street. It too depends on a network of fragmentary material (here on thousands of index cards and notes) in its attempt to conjure and preserve memory.

    

Does the net accomplish its task? Can the suitcases contain the world? Criticisms of structuralism shed critical light here: Luper’s world cannot be a complete logic of the world. Whatever these nodal points represent, their symbolic coherence is liable to deconstruction. We sense this ourselves, in the slippery abduction of one pattern by another in our attempts to understand what is being referred to. Such an effect is Greenaway’s intention. The creation of formal systems is something that reoccurs in Greenaway’s work, but they are seldom, if ever, intended as a coherent whole. Rather, they are often an armature for a playful echoing of the main text, frequently  threatening to overwhelm it.

 

The spatiality of this installation reflects the work’s supposed distribution through space and time (each suitcase representing a point on Luper’s journeys). The suitcases are assembled here as a collection of Luper’s life: one could imagine them as a series of chapters of his life. As we make our way through the various rooms of the installation we are in the process of creating, as if through a process of investigation and reconstruction, a narration of Luper's life (or the life of uranium, or any of the other possible 'lives' the installation refers to). Who was Luper? He is a fictional character, but also a way of exploring a loss of identity: he is not so much the sum of his parts, as expressed here, as much as he is the vehicle for them. He is lost in the superabundance of his own evidence and its significance.

If we compare the ice that Greenaway deploys as the contents of one of the suitcases, with that implied in Roni Horn's work Doubt by Water, we are looking on the one hand at a substance whose properties are reported and constrained in a system that gains its life from its continual reexamination by the viewer as a table of combinatory possibilities. This ice, is fixed, and does not melt. Rather its capabilities (of freezing, melting, coldness) are signified and deployed (albeit that we are invited to doubt the stability of the signification so deployed). Roni Horn's ice, however, is under observation. It melts. changes, flows. Roni Horn's ice is not part of a collection, it is part of an observation. Isaac Julien's work Vagabondia shows another way of encountering a collection.

Isaac Julien
Vagabondia

 

  Vagabondia  (which means 'realm of the vagabonds') is a video installation by the artist Isaac Julien. Its setting is the bafflingly replete house of John Soane, the architect. It's now a museum , left to the nation by Soane, on condition that its original state not be altered. It has remained a treasure house of Soane's mania for collecting antique sculpture and assorted other material. The house itself was designed and continuously altered by Soane to house his collection. Consequently it is riddled with views through to other spaces; there are many skylights and unexpected twists and turns. A room built to house his collection of Hogarth paintings has fold-out walls that double the space available for showing. One wall unexpectedly swings open to give a view of another floor. All the surfaces of the house are covered in bits of sculpture, paintings and other evidence of Soane's collector's mania, This is the setting for Julien's artwork. Julien's work has previously examined issues of sexuality, race and identity. This is an opportunity for him to produce a contemporary reflection on how these issues crop up in the colonial collection of the Soane museum.

 

A reflection is literally what Julien offers. His installation is set up with two touching screens, twinning each other as a mirror image, which plays on the repetion and symmetry of forms echoing each other across the visual space of the screen. This is also an opportunity for Julien to show difference from this repetitive rule: when it is not obeyed, we really notice it. It ruptures the harmonious order of the reflection. Julien has set the the Soane house as a scene which becomes an echo chamber of time and space for us, the viewers, and for the people he shows us moving about inside. A black museum attendant sees ghosts: sees aspects of the houses' history, sees, perhaps, versions of herself. Soane, along with white and black characters in contemporary eighteenth century and modern dress move about in the museum, each involved in reflecting upon themselves. Soane looks gloomily into one of the house's many distorting mirrors; a lady puts on pearls, stroking them as if unfamiliar- as if this is a sort of 'dressing up'- something out of the ordinary. Julien also includes a dancer figure, whose movements, choreographed by Javier de Frutos, seem suited to the vagabond of the installation's title. This figure is the representation of the intersection of the realm of the vagabond and the ordered classical world the house aspires to. The vagabond is free, but tortured. His movements flow where the house stands implacable, but he is also prone to gestures of apparent agony. There is an interface between these two worlds, but it is not an altogether comfortable one. Our reflections, shown by Julien in the formal aspect of the finstallation, and again through the narrative device of the museum attendant's reflection, correspond to just such an interface. We reflect the the history of the Soane museum in ourselves. It is a wonderful kind of dressing up for all of us, white or black, but it is the product, inescapably, of a colonial past that affects white and black identities alike. This is a potentially productive interface, but one fraught with attendant agonies: free, but tortured.

 

The vagabond/dancer bounces off the walls, flows through the spaces, seems trapped by them. Are they a prison? (And this is a strange prison, full of mirrors, unexpected spaces and communicating passages). Is the chaotic served by the order of the classical space? Or merely oppressed by it? Certainly they derive identity from one another. The vagabond haunts the space: it is at once a true spirit of the place and a being trapped in the space. It is surrounded by cool stone, but it seems to speak more in the erotics of the flesh: dance rather than sculpture.

 

The way in which Julien has employed a space to contain his narrative, its historical interpretation, and its meditation on identities are aspects of his practice which I relate to strongly.

 

 

 

  Andrew Eason

  The Remembrancer

 

 

 

 

The Remembrancer, like Luper at Compton Verney and Vagabondia, is based on a collection set in a particular history. Like them, it too unfolds an emerging identity that likewise questions what it means to fashion an identity from the interpretation or critique of historical sources. This same space for doubt is also seen in Doubt by Water and Illiers Combray. The Remembrancer is based on a cache of original photographs from what was then British India, taken in the early 20th-century. These photographs were signed and numbered, the apparent record of a trip through the Indian subcontinent, showing a wide variety of lanscape and urban subjects, but steering clear of portraiture. A stray photo shows a man in colonial khakis surrounded by cameras, tiffin tin and his Jack Russell dog (who appears in several photographs as a dot amongst the gigantic scenery of mountain passes and waterfalls). Accompanying these was a letter from the Remembrancer of the Lord Mayor's office, inviting a man (presumably the photographer) to the Lord Mayor's Banquet in 1933. I began to imagine this event taking place, and began fashioning a story around the idea of the photographer's reminiscences of his time in India. He reconstructs the journey he took earlier in the career which has culminated in this banquet, journeying again in memory. He imagines a remembered place, one essentially unreal, though supported by his photographs. In a sense he acknowledges this himself. His recollections are of a place and time he cannot return to, cannot touch, one he can only corrupt. He yearns to contact, but finally wants only to exorcise his ghost from this remembered land.

We as British viewers (of all ethnic origins) have a chance to reassess these images and daydreams and reconstruct and revisit our attitudes to our shared colonial past. Like Julien's Vagabond character, the photographer seems to haunt an unreal world, one with which he continues to interact, but one with whom his interactions are perpetually under reassessment. This is no less true in our own world: our history is one which is continually written, continually re-membered in the ongoing interpretation and refashioning of our individual and collective identities.

In the overtly character-narrated form of The Remembrancer I am suggesting the permeability of stories: we can find the present in the past, the past inside the present. Our contemporary meaning for these pictures is not actually that spoken by my narrator, nevertheless he is involved in a process of interpretation similar to our own, one which ongoing.

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What has been striking in writing about this collection of work is the different ways in which they have explored their common grounds of identity, history and narrative. The two books shown use different strategies to explore what are in some ways similar subjects. The border between memory and reality and the journeys we make traversing it are the subjects of Illiers Combray and The Remembrancer alike. Yet despite similarities due to the book form of both, they remain contrasting works of art. Douglas' work is wordless (in fact it is accompanied by a soundtrack designed by Zoë Irvine) and there is no overt narrator (perhaps perambulator is the correct term). Yet there is a bracketing of the work by the presence of the reader, and the figure of a dreaming subject occurs in the book. There is a narrative force, a framing subject, despite the work's subtlety in including this. My own work, The Remembrancer, is quite specific in identifying a narrator who provides a textual narrative. However, because he is clearly a character placed in a historical context, whose views and presuppositions are presented as at least as circumstantial as the imagery he reframes, I think that the story he tells remains open to our fertile reinterpretation. There are differences in metaphorical structure, too. Douglas' tapestry is not the same as my journey. (Which seems to occur in a series of stacatto sections. Perhaps, as the narrator consumes each new recollection, we might come to see it as a banquet, with a series of courses.) Nevertheless, we are both undertaking journeys into memory and imagination.

The Remembrancer shares with Luper at Compton Verney and Vagabondia, a grounding in events of historical and political significance. But the three artworks are very different. To speak only of their subjects, Julien's work with the historical backgrounding of the Soane museum has a particular connection with Black British experience and identity, and Greenaway's work seems cast in the direction of presenting (at least in part) connections of Jewish identity , with Europe's engagement with its post-war future defined powerfully by nuclear weapons and its historical coincidence with the establishment of the state of Israel. My own work with a collection of material pertaining to  India does not reflect  any particular involvement with Indian history and identity. Instead, I am approaching issues of British (and in my own case White British identity).  None of the three present their examinations of identity as a polemical project.  All three share the characteristic of using the viewer's reaction to a collection of artefacts to show how all identities are continuously constructed, that all interpretations from history, and in that sense all identities are potentially shared. At any rate all the historical material we can muster cannot close the borders of identity to traffic. The uncertainty of The Remembrancer is the uncertainty of an identity that cannot reliably reconstruct itself through its own extant stories.

This open border is seen again in Helen Douglas' work and that of Roni Horn, both of which reference identity in terms of interpretation. Other works by Douglas refer to lansdscape as an influential force in creating identity which would lend them greater coincidence with Horn's. On the other hand, other works of Horn's feature more literary references. As it is Horn's work Doubt by Water is an installation, but it features certain pagelike qualities. Each individual image is part of a whole. The sequencing of the images is very much more fluid than that of a book, though there is a perceptible sequence to them. Douglas' book, on the other hand, occupies its virtual space. Its perambulations through the imagined and actual worlds of Proust and the Proustian tourist are physically realised in the very long accordion format of the book. (This feature, especially with the sound piece that accompanies it, is very tunnel-like. It seems very much a passageway, with incidental sounds from off stage informing the space to either side, as well as the spaces of imagination and remembrance they spark off). Horn's and Douglas' spatial references have certain affinities with Julien's use of the  Soane  museum as an enclosing  space and a collection.  Greenaway's space is defined wherever he sets his suitcases down, and the collection referenced is that which the suitcases themselves express and contain. The spatial metaphor of The Remembrancer is less strong. The book itself presents the narrative as an enclosed space, even going so far as to be sealed with wax and ribbon in reference to the original invitation to the banquet to which the photographer is invited. Within this, the photographer's journey takes place 'on the road' in India, which is too large a remit to be considered enclosing. Nonetheless it is an exploration of the borderlands between memory and actuality:  the enclosure in question is the one that defines him in actuality, in identity and in society. Can he cope with his dreams and remembrances.

This exhibition Borders of Identity, shows how several artists have found ways to explore the unclear differences between states of identity: real, imaginary, remembered, historical, literary and so on. They have found several ways to present their meditations: as a tapestry, as a banquet, as a net, as a journey, as a collection, a dance, a room, a house, a book.