Jonathan Wateridge - Group Series 2007 -

Images
Group Series No. 4 - School Play

  

Notes on Group Series
July 2008
 
 

 "If you don't write your own history, someone else will,

 and this history will suit their purposes." Mike Kelley

 

"Even if I am resurrecting (...) obsolete forms of

representation, I'm always indicating their inability to

represent the real subject of the work." Stan Douglas

 

"It may be true that the work is made by one person,

but it is not necessarily true that it is to be viewed by one

person, or one person thinking of themselves importantly as

one. It may be that it is important for one person to think of

themselves importantly as one of many". TJ Clark

 

Trying to remember one's first memories of the visual languages of the adult world is an interesting exercise.

 The way I remember my understanding of certain things as a child is rather like saying a word over and over until it loses its meaning and you end up with a strange, lateral impression of something. As a boy, I remember rifling through news magazines lying around the house and would see images, for example, of a gathering of politicians. I had no idea who these people were or what they were doing but somehow the images conveyed 'importance'. Even now when clearly I recognise politicians or dignitaries, they are sometimes rendered anonymous by my associative memories of the kind of picture they're in.
 

In conjunction with a sense of fiction or fabrication, the notion of people and the 'kind of picture they're in' has become a primary concern in my work where subjects are distilled into a 'perfect memory' of the type of image represented.

 In an emerging series of paintings, which employ a combination of live models, constructed scale sets and costumes, the various generic groups depicted serve to remake the individual viewer as part of a series of collective identities.
 
The element of role play is particularly significant. With upcoming subjects like historical reenactment societies or a school play, it can work on different levels; from the performative awareness of the subjects depicted to the 'performance' of the individuals I cast in the paintings. It is important to understand that the figures represented in the paintings are playing the part of someone else. This creates a potential schism in the viewing of the work and an interplay of identification and non-identification. The sense that these figures are in 'someone else's skin' plays up the notion that these identities are ultimately fluid and that the paintings as a whole are more of an exploration of types, systems and institutions.
 

I have no way of determining an audience's response but the paintings should create a heightened sense of the 'real' despite the image being an almost total fiction.

I want the viewer to be able to buy in to the image enough to want to spend time with it, to elicit a certain level of recognition that then starts to fragment.

Despite any sense of familiarity one might have with the imagery, seeds of doubt are sewn and you come to recognise that its not what you thought it was.

The only element that should perhaps survive scrutiny are the individuals depicted. The level of identification the viewer has with the figures is therefore fundamental.

It is their peculiarly physical presence that gives the paintings a very uncanny quality. This potential for uncertainty in the pictures is an element I intend to increasingly exploit.

 

The 'source' material for the paintings is by nature archival. The staging of any group for the purposes of documentation whatever the medium immediately becomes about the past, about commemoration or collective memory. When a group assembles for a 'documentary' moment, time accelerates and the instance becomes immediate history.

 My role as the 'director', in a visual process that mimics the making of a film, is crucial to the problem of this sense of 'dated' imagery.
 
The 'happening' - a performative act - directed by and conceived by an artist negates the problem of the generic dating of any source material. The re-staging is the depiction, any historical element becomes purely referential. And arguably as the themes have been re-staged via the prism of my subjective choices, there is no actual referent for these images as such. Therefore in the same way that memory only exists in the present tense, the 'recollected', being completely constructed, is always defined by current understanding.
 

The contemporary re-staging of the paintings importantly injects insecurity into our understanding of these images and introduces levels of remove from any fundamental notions of truth. This occurs not only in the way that the paintings are constructed but also in terms of the subjects. Astronomers, paleontologists or archaeologists, reenactments and archivists - they're all an attempt to measure, understand or delineate the world but are kept at a distance by time or space, always at a remove from the object of their interest. As well as any thematic links between the images, the depicted groups are all aware of being involved in a 'public' moment, or on display. These are 'trophy' moments exhibiting evidence of pride or even hubris.

 

These ideas are at the heart of a notionally aspirational image such as Group Series No.2 - Space Program. The exploration of Space (which of course has a nice resonance in relation to painting) represents an escape from ourselves and our earthbound ties, both physical and psychological. The figures personify the vanguard of an effort to understand the unknown. Astronauts operate at the outer limits of our experience, in 'outer-liminal' space so to speak. At the edge of understanding of our tangible experience of the world, they exist in a twilight of endeavour that is unknowable to all but a handful and as such take on symbolic status. They appeal to a child like sense of awe and adventure yet are the ultimate display of a culture's economic power and political ideology.

 

And of course one immediately thinks of the Space Race. But there's an irresponsibility on the part of the painting in relation to history or facts. The truth falls down and the picture plays with gravitas. Though you might initially believe the image, subtle but mischievous clues to the fictionality of the work are introduced: for example, the milk bottle top or a mobile phone keypad on the ship; plumbing parts on the space suits. As soon as you are made aware of these elements, there's something mildly comic about the image but also darkly so in the sense that this would obviously be a completely doomed mission!

 

But that's perhaps already implicit in the narrative of the image. The title Space Program puts the emphasis more on earthly planning than it does the heroics of space maneuvres. The ship is still under construction, these men are gathered in anticipation of future glory not in celebration of established deeds. Hence there's a certain tension in the gathering; there's pride but also reservation.

 

In Group Series No.1 - Sandinistas, the clues to its fictionality lie in the rupture between the robust modeling of the figures and the flattened space of the landscape, reminiscent of a theatrical back drop. The figures are not contained within the scene in 'photographic', homogenous, pictorial harmony and instead of being safe within a determined context, they are almost pushed out into our space in direct confrontation. The exaggerated stillness of the figures is perhaps reflective of a form of stasis one might find in an anthropological diorama at a natural history museum and this stillness is further reinforced by the temporal nature of painting.

 Military paintings in particular are traditionally associated with commemoration of victories and the celebration of the State. To depict a marginalized group or outsiders potentially undermines that tradition but is also historically anthropological in that by virtue of the dispossession of these figures in relation to power, they represent something that has (or has been) 'lost'.
 
 If the Sandinistas were an empathetic depiction of real fighters in a 'realistic' context it is not only potentially open to accusations of a kind of cultural tourism on my part but also of fixing identity in a way that makes absolute our relationship to these figures as 'other'; of another 'class', potentially destitute and, in the case of a guerilla movement literally marginalized. The fictionality of the painting ensures that the emphasis is more on our understanding and consumption of images of this type of group than it is about the reality of their existence.
 

These clues are subliminal but I like the idea of having a unified surface or image that is then disrupted internally, the picture doesn't have to wear its agenda on its sleeve. At the moment, perhaps, the illusion is too successful but I would argue that's because so far there are only two paintings. As soon as others join the series, especially the more explicit subjects like School Play, the reading of pictures like Space Program will be substantially affected. And, of course, its only through the process of making the paintings that one becomes aware of where best to draw the lines so to speak.

 Also, there's an important distinction to be made between the reading of surface symbolic meanings and the resonant aspects of their material embodiment. This finds its simplest form in the act of looking at a reproduction of a realist painting and the actual thing itself. Most significantly it is at the heart of the question as to why, for example, my images are paintings and not photographs.
 

The most honest and direct answer would be that I'm a painter and above all a realist painter. I love looking at paintings and I love making them. The material pleasure I take in making these pictures is fundamental to a viewer's enjoyment of them and I'm certainly not going to make any excuses for that. But I'm also aware that one can't paint in a vacuum and I've spent many years trying to find a way in which to make large scale realist images that are viable in a contemporary context but which also do not rely on an 'art of quotation marks' in order to justify themselves.

 For me, the kind of painting that too readily reveals its references or intentions often possesses a form of studied irony which ultimately absolves them materially as paintings. You're left only with the idea and the image becomes illustrational.
 For my work to operate I think its important not to be too overt. Fictions are always more revealing if you buy in to them. The 'grandeur' and ambition of the pictures in in relation to scale and history painting means that their volume is turned up enough already. So in terms of the content of the paintings I want to perform with a deadpan expression, almost indifferent to the people depicted. There should be a seriousness and lack of irony or judgment that becomes integral to the uncanniness of the picture. The potential for disruption in the image occurs because it seems too convincing, too perfect and my access to the situation too complete.
 
 If any suspicion of the image takes place then the fact that the figures are painted performs a kind of double lie. Painting as an art form is no longer beholden to the everyday which means it is stripped of a responsibility to be a marker for the real. Therefore its uncanniness can become even more striking because it is almost unexpected. The convincingness of the figures means you hang on to them for security as it becomes increasingly clear that the rest of the image has no foundation. But of course as painting, they're as much a fiction as anything else. If the figures were photographs you more readily accept them as 'reality' and the set up as a staging, that this is all a play on a documentary moment. You 'get the point'.

But once its all been cohered into a painted image, those boundaries are blurred somewhat and a viewer's 'knowingness' is removed. Ironically you believe in the image precisely because it is a painting and not a photograph. You are tricked into a more child-like response and I enjoy the possibilities that this provokes.

 It is perhaps an echo of my own childhood response to images and that sense of a strange, lateral impression of the world born of the familiar.