James Whittingham

TITLE: Journal

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

I will be working on a project that will probably take the form of an installation with ‘wallpaper’ on the walls and wall-mounted photographs, drawings or paintings hung over the top.

The wallpaper will develop out of material experiments with paper and paint, experiments which I have been engaged in for the past year. I am interested in the problem of presenting or trying to look at works on a wall when the wall seems to be speaking louder than, or as loudly as the works themselves – when the wall covering does not complement the works or recede and become a background to them but instead overflows into them or distracts from them. The wall is meant to be ignored, or at least not the focus of our attention, which is ridiculous, think of all the documentation of white cube gallery spaces you have seen where the gleaming white walls are the most visually forthcoming part of the image (for this reason, I am proposing bright colours, no white). A wall is meant to be leant-on, nailed into. It is meant to support or shield but it is not meant to be of interest. It has its place within a hierarchy but I am looking at what happens if you elevate what is the backdrop to the forefront of people’s attention. I am not trying to personify the wall. I don’t empathise with walls. In fact I am proposing to cover the wall with garish paper. But as an idea, the wallpaper and the art, I am looking at neither being relatively unimportant.

As for the wall mounted items (the photographs/drawings…) I will develop an idea for these from the previous series of photographs or paintings I have done in the past year at this institute and before. Not necessarily as a continuation of their subjects – vases, buildings… – but as a development from the method and the material experiments.

The previous series of photographs I am referring to were photographic investigations into various objects or buildings, which I displayed organised into long strands or groups of photographic prints. Not, so far, people but I am interested in perhaps introducing a human element for this forthcoming work. I am interested in series of images. In photographing a vase or a building from numerous angles and vantage points you are performing an investigation into that object. The display of the images in a long line is something like film, the images having been edited to convey a particular mood that the objects couldn’t otherwise have conveyed, had they not been subjected to such a process. Also, the process is funny, to repetitively meditate on such lowly phenomena or objects. In taking pictures of something again and again, first from one angle, then another angle, then another angle, then another, then another, then another and displaying them similarly, I am trying to make something infinite. Of course it does stop eventually and I have edited and made choices both when taking the pictures and also when displaying them but, as there is no natural break, there is potential, within a series of photographs of, say, a broken second-hand vase from Ikea, for infinitude.

The static work described might have a performance element enacted nearby. I have found performance can be a good way of sharing a text piece with the world, rather than presenting it written down. I am at the moment unsure how this would happen in any final presentation but for now I will start by collating various pieces of text I have written over the last year. The rest of my work may not but these texts do feature people.

RELATION TO PREVIOUS PRACTICE

The wallpaper idea developed from a series of paintings titled Monochromes. The monochromes are made from paper, folded into a grid, which is then painted with layers of watercolours and gouaches of similar colours (which mingle together), and washed and re-painted, all of which damages the paper, causing it start disintegrating. This leaves people unsure about the history of the object.

Monochromes acted solely as paintings and while doing them an idea developed to use them as wallpaper (how it developed is in the paragraph below). The idea to employ a wall covering (and refer to it as wallpaper) came much earlier however, during work on a still on going project, Roses, which consisted of many identical photographs stuck together in an ever-expanding grid.

It is an easy next step to look at an object made of many identical tessellated parts but which has a definite edge and imagine it instead continuing infinitely in all directions. This is how the monochromes developed from paintings into wallpaper. The idea being that, as wallpaper, the painting can keep spreading, like liquid, until it reaches the walls of the container.

Roses consists of glossy photographs of flowers, taken in various municipal parks and private gardens in London during the summer of 2010, printed at a local supermarket’s photographic ‘lab’ (big Kodak printer) and finally tessellated into square or rectangular ‘swatches’. I always meant for them to become wallpaper, not as prints on a roll of paper, pasted to a wall, but similarly to their current form, as thousands or even tens of thousands of individual photographs, cropped and stuck together with tape to form a contiguous wall of flowers.

My island The monochrome paintings formed a backdrop to a performance I acted out lying on the floor with the monochromes hanging in a line, high above me. I wore sunglasses and spoke from memory a text titled My island. I think of the text as a letter to you, an anonymous person in charge of my artistic legacy. It is in two parts, each one describing an impossible situation. In the first, I talk about my adopted home, an island exactly the same size as my recumbent body, teeming with an over-abundance of plant life and magical aquifers. The second part is heralded by a dream that the character recalls about his future grave at the centre of a giant, specially constructed mausoleum.

Esperanto Instituto Rotterdamo (closed on Sundays) and Blue meets yellow These two photographic series were displayed together. I falsely refer to the world Esperanto association’s Rotterdam HQ as the Esperanto Instituto Rotterdamo. This does make sense in Esperanto but it is not its name. These photos are tightly cropped images of various incidental feature of the instituto’s architecture: the doorbell, chairs, blind pullers, a little sign in Esperanto telling passers-by the doorbell is to the right and books that were on display. These photographs are very beautiful and mysterious. I had them printed 10cm x 7cm, to mimic the half-frame cameras of photography’s thrifty past, even though they are from digital files and I displayed them on large sheets of either white or pink paper.

Blue meets yellow is a series of around 50 inkjet prints of digital photographs of two vases arranged on an infinity wall, alongside some pebbles. The photographs were displayed in chronological order, so as sunlight entered and ruined the infinity effect, it happened in real time and is documented thus. The sunlight is as much of an actor in the play of objects as the vases, the pebbles and the infinity wall, even though it was an accident; the natural world got in and improved what would otherwise have been a visually very boring work.

The strange surface of these photographs comes from a convoluted, pseudo-photographic process I developed especially for them. The casual observer may notice something strange about the paper but wouldn’t know what exactly had brought them to that state. The process started with a long roll with all the images inkjet printed on it. I cut them out into individual frames and dipped them all in water. After they had dried I painted some of them with PVA glue to make them glossy, ‘like photographs’.

Ceramic works These are vase-shaped sculptures made from clay, left-unfired, smeared around a mass produced ceramic vase.

The latest incarnation involved larger vases than before. Due to the size and the relative thinness of the layer, the resulting sculptures developed deep cracks during the clay’s drying period. I used short strips of masking tape to hold the drifting chunks together.

These sculptures break easily and can be shown only once. They can’t be stored. The idea is passed on so the next time one is needed it can be brought into existence with the knowledge that it will soon be gone again. I see them therefore as being like stage props for theatre.

All of these works are about particularly lowly phenomena or artefacts.

RELATION TO A LARGER CONTEXT and PRACTICAL STEPS

The thesis will contain analysis and discussion of some of my previous artworks. I might use the works as anchors or markers to guide the text through the other ideas or they might form the primary part of the text. Or both.

I think it would be good for the writing to have a journalistic quality, containing fragments of conversations I have had with people around the subjects I am looking at, hence the quoting of David Musgrave and Vivian Sky Rehberg, ‘Lawrence’ and others and hence again the working title, Journal.

I have been thinking about a quote I read in which Robert Gober spoke about his early kitchen and bathroom sink sculptures. One commentator had referred to their having been made by a gay artist and their uselessness, the obsessive remaking of a functional item as a functionless object (obviously forgetting that as sculptures they have a defined use). The next thing Gober did with the sink sculptures was to introduce taps with running water, which of course one would expect of a sink, that it would have taps and water would be passing through them. Except in this case, water ran constantly through them without cease, into the sink, down the drain and back round to the tap. A fountain. However, Gober spoke of his sculptures, instead of being functionless or somehow broken, as they had allegedly been before, as working “beautifully, almost to excess”. To me, if something works to excess it isn’t working. It is working to excess. In other words it is still broken. It depends how you look at it. For example, when I discussed this with Vivian Sky Rehberg she said she thought Gober’s quote sounded like a description of a system working well, efficiently. She thinks my take on it suggests that I think there is somewhere a “sweet spot, where things work perfectly”.

I said that’s not what I meant, just that if something is working too much it is not working as intended. A tap is not meant to run forever, it is meant to go on and off.

This reminds me of camp. But I don’t know what the word means exactly. I am going to read On Camp by Susan Sontag as part of my research into the thesis.

An artist called David Musgrave works at Chelsea College of Art. He was my thesis supervisor for the thesis I wrote there in 2004 – that was also last one I wrote. I haven’t written one since. But now I am in an institution again with a thesis to write. My forthcoming thesis was on my mind when I recently had a dream in which I was waiting to eat in a pale-coloured restaurant. I was sitting at a table with David Musgrave, opposite a woman and him. It was a pleasant atmosphere, although nobody was talking.

I want to incorporate dreams into the thesis. I think the one about David Musgrave is especially important because it creates a loop I can work with. A research loop.

David Musgrave’s work will be one thing I look into. His work is drawing and sculpture. Usually the drawings are modestly sized and in a frame but he also does enormous wall drawings. There is often something resembling a living thing within his drawings, or they are drawings of plains upon which have ‘fallen’ incidental item such as bits of fluff, paper scraps, berries, and other indiscernible shapes. I am thus far unsure that his work bears any relation to mine, in a way I am letting my dream guide me. I will also discuss (certain elements of) my previous thesis in a kind of remote sense. Like the casting process, there will be a reverse of that piece of text within this one. I think that could be an interesting method of working, to tell the story of that previous slab of work as a memory. Also, there were things in that work that I am still concerned about in my work now and I think it could be fruitful to reassess those thoughts anew and even to talk about the process of remembering as an art-making tool. There will not be any direct quotes from that piece of writing. I will rely on what I can remember of it.

At the time David said he thought I should look at the novel Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Stern because of its strange punctuation as part of my research into elements that leap from the page and disrupt your reading of the text. Text is meant to carry meaning and be in itself invisible. Mostly, when reading, we do not concentrate on the letters. They enter us subconsciously. I was writing about what happens when text doesn’t function that way – when it instead disrupts your eye and takes your mind elsewhere, away from the writer’s intentions.

I think my current Wallpaper pieces could work like this too.

Tristram Shandy is a man who is trying to tell the story of his entire life, from the moment of conception onwards but keeps getting distracted and instead ends up working backwards in time from that moment.

David suggested I buy a new edition by the Everyman press that had recently published because it had the original layout and punctuation, including two entirely black pages, each replacing a page of text with a monochromatic block of ink.

My island came to me as a lucid dream in a state of near sleep. It is told in the 1st person, from the point of view of a character inspired by a real person – ‘Lawrence’, my family’s next-door neighbour until we moved house when I was 10 years old. Over tea, we would have conversations about mandalas and Jung’s theories on dreams. ‘Lawrence’ owns a huge, encyclopaedic collection of Jung’s books and it was the book on dreams that he would talk about. As a product of my intention of using dreams as a topic in the thesis and Lawrence’s underlying presence in my My island work I would like to make a special research trip to visit Lawrence at home in Birmingham to finally read the volume on dreams for myself and have a discussion with him again about the book.

In discussing my own work, something I already know I will bring up is the element of indestructibility, which I regularly build into my work. My ceramic sculptures are individually so fragile but as a body of work have the potential longevity of an orally transmitted legend or Sol LeWitt piece. They can’t be physically destroyed by tidal waves or graffiti because there is nothing physical to destroy.

There are many examples of cleaners destroying artworks; or school kids unleashing onto the unframed works in the Tate Modern’s latest survey into the œuvre of Sigmar Polke, a shaken-up 2 litre bottle of Coke. I read a news report about a gallery cleaner. The cleaner had scrubbed the inside of a bucket completely clean of paint. The problem was that the bucket was an integral part of a very valuable sculpture by the late Martin Kippenberger. The news report reported the sculpture destroyed. My thoughts on the matter were that we put too much value on the hand of the artist. In other art forms we do not expect the props on the stage to be the very same props that say, Samuel Beckett selected for the play’s first performance for it to be a worthwhile experience of theatre. We don’t expect the big jars or the grubby wheelchair to be the very same ones from all the previous performances. But in art we do. I know often we need to: if we’re talking about a drawing or painting and the hand of the artist is very present for example. But in the case of the Kippenberger bucket, I felt that one of the vast conservation departments of the museum or a university could reapply the paint and we could all once more enjoy the sculpture, unhindered, unaffected by the fact that Martin Kippenberger didn’t himself apply the paint. I thought it was important to make some art that had contingency plans built-in in case of any minor or major disasters.

REFERENCES

CARL JUNG The Red Book Man and His Symbols

SIGMUND FREUD The Interpretation of Dreams

SUSAN SONTAG On Camp

ROBERT GOBER Various works. Wallpaper.

DAVID MUSGRAVE Various

JOHN GRAY …