Two shows: Uncertain States annual exhibition in Whitechapel and the John Goto show at Art Jericho, Oxford.

 

What connects these twin exhibitions is Goto’s work Lewisham which appears to have had their first outings at these events and that leads me to consider the effect of context, of the artwork in a situation, but I’ll come to that later.

Uncertain States is ‘a lens based, artist led collective Releasing a quarterly newspaper we attempt to expand a critical dialogue and promote visual imagery. The work reflects some key social and political concerns and challenges how perception is formed in a society like ours, on issues as diverse as politics, religion and personal identity.

In a time where the proliferation of imagery is rendering itself insignificant and meaningless, the artists in Uncertain States are concerned with the intention of the work. All the work published is made to be viewed with consideration and concerned with the meaning and reading of the photograph.

Uncertain States aims to showcase both established and emerging artists also through our exhibitions and web based publications. We include work from all photographic genres. Releasing a quarterly newspaper we attempt to expand a critical dialogue and promote visual imagery. The work reflects some key social and political concerns and challenges how perception is formed in a society like ours, on issues as diverse as politics, religion and personal identity.

In a time where the proliferation of imagery is rendering itself insignificant and meaningless, the artists in Uncertain States are concerned with the intention of the work. All the work published is made to be viewed with consideration and concerned with the meaning and reading of the photograph.

Uncertain States aims to showcase both established and emerging artists also through our exhibitions and web based publications. We include work from all photographic genres.’ Website here

The catalogue for the show lists nearly thirty artists with, perhaps notably, Kennard Phillips, Tom Hunter and  Roy Mehta amongst them. Most of the work has a price tag, indicating a selling show. I had arranged this visit with Fiona Yaron-Field with whom I had contacted after visiting the Taylor Wessing 2013 show where she had been selected for her image ‘Becoming Annalie’. Fiona spent some time discussing the work with us, I was joined by two fellow students: Catherine Banks and Keith Greenough and her generosity was very helpful as we discussed the work and the artists behind them.

My overall impression of this ‘Group’ show is how difficult it was for me to comprehend the diversity, the inclusiveness of all the works on show. Spencer Rowell’s physically layered work that used dimensionality as part of it’s aesthetic explored the notion of self portrait from many perspectives, the layers of narrative matched by the application of layers of substance. The context of the work – which also interested me because of its use of text as a vital component – anchored in the written word became cogent only after Fiona provided the circumstance of the work and that opening to the work was extremely important to my comprehension – at least partways. Julian Benjamin’s ‘experiments in social fiction’ interested me in its use of a fictive narrative to develop ideas – in this case – as he says: “These are not pictures of things, these are pictures of ideas. I’m not saying this thing happened, I’m saying this idea happened.

And this is the photograph to prove it.”

But, as Benjamin says in the catalogue, he uses digital manipulation to create fantastic events, the photograph is evidence of it’s own truth and therefore is a self depiction of the real.

Frederica Landi’s examination of the transient marks on the human skin initially made me think of scarification but when I contemplated further I saw that these marks – the crumpling of skin, the marks of hair and the pressing of clothing to the skin’s surface were all transient marks, these marks reminded me of some work I have planned to explore about love and to which I hope to think about about starting soon.

Fiona Yaron-Field’s work continued her exploration of Down’s Syndrome condition.Ophir, her daughter, was born with is and I have written about it previously here and here. This new work looks at women – the 2% of expectant mothers who know they are carrying a child with this condition but who choose, for many different reasons, to carry the baby to term. It maybe the end of the project for this artist, but her discussion surrounding the work, her motivations were very interesting to hear in the context of the gallery.

So to John Goto’s work Lewisham. The artist spent some time in the 1970’s photographing young black people either singularly or as couples in front of a very makeshift backcloth before he left for Paris and a photographic scholarship that resulted in another work called Belleville. The Lewisham series were represented in Whitechapel by three images which were denoted as being printed by Micro piezo printing. Initially I wondered whether this technology was related to Piezography which I used in it’s very early introduction to the UK as a carbon based pigment ink system. It turns out that Goto was using he term as it relates to every inkjet printer and so I now wonder why, what I thought must have been an aesthetic choice that I couldn’t fathom is perhaps instead a simple issue of technical incompetence – which I can’t understand at all. These Lewisham Lover’s Rock series all have colour casts that I found distract from the observation of the subject. It may be that this colour casting is a deliberate ploy to add a tension to the image and in my lack of comprehension I gave up wondering and asked the artist himself. He very kindly provided me with other information but to the question of colour he hasn’t yet responded.

Now, whilst I am perplexed about the Lewisham series, which have a notion of Sidibe’s work about them his other work Belleville is another aesthetic altogether. These are moderately sized images one achieves a 20” x 16” size, but most are smaller, printed on Agfa Record Rapid with Neutol WA, these are works of beauty in and of themselves. Their consistency of tonal structure is at great odds with the digital prints, their stillness as images are though very similar. What I found myself thinking about is how now through a perspective of nearly forty years hence both sets of images are about memory. The instant generation of memory by the recording of these youngsters in Lewisham and the old architectural studies of Paris which were already steeped in memory as they were photographed.

The Belleville studies were of shop windows, old streets and doorways, old pictures in dilapidated condition, these images were layered in patina after patina of echoing and aching memory, marked by the presence of the jetsam of life and, as in a few images, the depiction of peoples long forgotten in old photographs. These images were still, marking the passing of a time and now, printed as they are in a process and on a paper that no linger exists they are images of something that is no more, just as much as the fleeting capture of the Lewisham Lovers Rock portraits are of a people and a place no longer there – though the genre of Lovers Rock is making something of a comeback – perhaps that is why these images turned up at the gallery in Whitechapel and not the ones that had been selected by the artist originally?

Which leaves me considering the way in which these prints were created. The wider expansive digital prints, from scanned negatives with clear and apparent digital artefacts about them and the gorgeously toned lustrous warm tine, moderately sized prints, printed to express the images in the best possible light. I am confused. Goto kindly provided a link to a Photomonitor article where he suggested I might find the answers to the questions I posed to him earlier today. I’ve read it a couple of times and this question of aesthetic still eludes me.

Heightened focus – Tom Hunter at the BIAD

Tom Hunter exhibition, St Paul’s, Birmingham

In the beginning photography created an ‘altered state’ in what was, and to some extent still is, the heady realm of ‘Art’; it provided a means by which an image could be taken to the people rather than wait for that singular creation of oil or marble to make its way to the people. It would appear that the early practitioner’s of this new technological medium didn’t fully appreciate that they had a ‘game-changer’ in their hands; until, that is, Kodak developed the means by which the great unwashed would be able to grasp the film winder and participate in the development of ‘Art’. That ‘Art’ was almost entirely in the control of the manicured hands of those that ‘had’ before the ‘Brownie’ rent asunder that divide and democratised the medium and that it is today slowly and inexorably being subsumed back into those self same institutional paws is not the she subject of this post.

Tom Hunter came to ‘Art’ late, he had participated in a different life before finding his voice in photography, or perhaps rather using photography as his voice. One of his key areas of interest was to subvert the notion that ‘Art’ was for the those whose lives were privileged, who by the lucky happenstance of birth would be inculcated into the language, the history, the elitism of ‘Art’, and that mere mortals would always have to struggle with the contextual baggage that accompanied ‘Art’. Hunter sought to suggest that the lives of the people close to him, living in a squat in Hackney, had every right to expect access to that hitherto exclusive world of the ‘haves’. Hunter strove to include the people around him into his narratives, using classical art pieces gleaned from the National Gallery as a basis to challenge not only the place of ‘Art’ in a social context, but also directly to the establishment, as he sought to bring attention to the plight of his fellow squatters. I have written about this side of his early work here and here. But it was to explore his newer work that took me to the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, to hear him discuss his work as well as look at some of it in two outside installations in the city.

Reprinted by kind permission of the artist Tom Hunter

A lot of Hunter’s work of late has veered away from the overtly political, though it is never far away from his thoughts. The use of a pin-hole camera to photograph, what on the face of it, are architectural shots of factories – both decrepit and functional – concert halls, religious meeting places; or to put it another way, places that were meant for people to convene for a specific purpose, is, on the face of it a curious one. Bedevilled with compositional difficulties, the wooden box pin-hole camera has very graphic visual aberrations (that he doesn’t try and hide away from, rather glories, it seems, in them). No tilt and shift gadgetry here. These images usually contain the presence of a stage, be it an actual performance hall with a proscenium arch, or a concert hall, an alter or similar. These shots, these long exposure shots are interesting because they do not present the people who inhabit/inhabited the space. Very few of the images have strong referential imagery that places the physical presence of people at the core of the work, rather though they suggest the presence of people. One gets the notion of the spectre of people present. Of people who used to inhabit these places. Hunter’s commission in the second city is, by his own admission, held fast to the documentarian tradition but with strong fictional overtones, he feels free to adapt the fiction to fit the truth, and the use of the pin-hole camera serves two purposes I think in the process. Firstly it allows time for the images to develop, both in the mind of the photographer but also in the wooden box that slowly fills with light. Hunter likes to have a parallel life when the exposure is taking place, to have a chat with whomever is with him in the building, the Imam, the Rabbi, the factory owner, the gold smelter. That the images aren’t digitally clean seems to suggest that the filmic quality of the photographs have a narrative embedded into the negative slowly allowing the chemical action to take place and help shape that narrative. Furthermore, the optical qualities of the pin-hole produce images that force the viewer to Hunter’s vision. The images aren’t generally very sharp anywhere on the photograph, but if anywhere the centre core of the photograph is the easiest for the viewer to rest at. Not for this photographer, with these images, the edge to edge sharpness of, dare I say, a Crewdson filmic composition. Hunter wants the viewer to consider the image in a static way, easily finding the core and finding it more satisfactory to rest there rather than trying to un-pick the visual aberrations that a pin-hole aperture creates. Hunter therefore directs the viewer to his perspective, leaving perhaps less for the viewer to explore of their own volition. And then, in Hunter’s words, “allow the story to develop in the mind of the viewer”.

Piano – detail

Curtains – detail

The weather, for viewing outside installations was, to put it mildly, hardly conducive. Cold, wet and very windy these two exhibitions didn’t appear to witness many viewers other than Anne, also a student with the OCA and me. I was struck by a number of things: Firstly of course was the fact that the images were subverted by the presence of a layer of water on the image. This extra layer of texture added to the feeling of the presence of ‘ghosts’ maybe not in the machine, but in the spaces that were being pointed out by the directionality of the pin-hole, heightening the focus of our attention with, in Hunter’s own words, “the requiem of a dream’ that was once the power house of the Industrial revolution, that paid the men who paid the taxes that emancipated the youth through education and that in contrast to today’s universities which are ‘finishing schools for rich kids’.

And that, in the process of the commission, this work was to be shown outside and free 24/7 as it states in one of the pieces of marketing that I saw. The artwork being placed directly in front of the public inviting the viewers to engage and take direction from Hunter, not being forced to venture into some hallowed hall, but in the environment of the everyday, democratising the ‘art’, inviting a discourse with all and sundry. And this chimes with something else that Hunter spoke about during his talk, about connectedness. About how he needs to feel connected, which I am assuming to mean invested in, as much as connected to, his subject to allow himself the engagement to make the piece of art. The connectedness he feels with the process of film, the connectedness he feels with the subject and the connectedness he feels with the people and place.

All in all another inspiring connection with the artist.