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.