James Whittingham

ALAS, POOR YORICKE

DREAMING DAVID MUSGRAVE

The last thesis I wrote was during my BA at Chelsea College of art in 2005. David Musgrave was my supervisor.

Recently I 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.

My current thesis was on my mind.

David Musgrave’s work will be one thing I look into. 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. 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 and I was writing about what happens when it doesn’t function that way – when it instead disrupts your eye and takes your mind elsewhere, away from the writer’s intentions.

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.

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.

COLLATED (BITS OF) WRITING

I have written a number of ‘letters’ and stories. I have also recorded in writing some of my dreams. I would like to collate these texts so I can see how they function together and maybe work them into the thesis.

I have shown some of these texts as works before but mostly they have remained unshown and seen only by me. One that I did expose to other human beings was a text called My island, which I memorised and acted out as a performance. This text began life as a confluence of thoughts that occurred to me in a dreamlike state immediately prior to falling asleep. So this was not exactly a dream – I had some control over the directions of thought, it was not entirely a product of my sub-conscious and so was a sort of lucid dream.

My thesis will be partially about dreams. I will start by describing and discussing the visitation by a spectral David Musgrave in a ghostly dream-restaurant.

I will read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and Jung’s The Red Book and Man and His Symbols.

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 who was 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.

MY WORK

The thesis will contain analysis and discussion of my artwork. 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.

Again referring to My island, particularly the impossible abundance of life, 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 them, having been made by a gay artist, and their uselessness, the obsessive remaking of a functional item, the sink, as a functionless object (obviously forgetting that as sculptures they have a defined use). The next thing he 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 Vivien 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 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.

Then I thought of gay culture and camp and said, I must read On Camp by Susan Sontag. Vivien agreed that would be a good idea and so here I am announcing that I will read On Camp as part of my research

KIPPENBERGER’S BUCKET

In discussing my own work, something I already know I will bring up is the ‘indestructibility clause’ 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. They exist only as information and are therefore only as fragile as society.

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; lipsick on a Twombly or graffiti on a Rothko. 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.

(John Gray)

–Yoricke is a character from Tristram Shandy. The discovery of his skull and the exclamation, 'Alas, poor Yoricke!', (lifted from Hamlet) happen immediately before the first of the two black pages.

RESEARCH/READING

David Musgrave

Lawrence Stern Tristram Shandy

Sigmund Freud Interpretation of Dreams

Carl Jung The Red Book

(+ another book from Collected Works)

Susan Sontag On Camp

John Gray Straw Dogs

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.

I displayed them on a convoluted plinth with a maximum elevation of 1cm above the floor. The plinth was made from neatly folded towels upon which rested the ceramic works in a museum-like line-up. The three towels formed a rectangular enclosure in the centre of the room, two of whose sides I fenced-off with waves of silk ties, weighted down with the same pebbles that appeared in the Blue meets yellow photos. The remaining side of the enclosure I left an opening so people could enter. This was made of two silk tie spirals (or flourishes), also held in place with pebbles, a mysterious force having seemingly burst out of the enclosure and escaped.

On the walls around this floor drawing/sculpture/performance piece were two photographic series, Esperanto Instituto Rotterdamo (closed on Sundays) and Blue meets yellow.

In the title I falsely refer to the world Esperanto association’s Rotterdam head quarters 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, ‘la sonorillo estas dekstre’ 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. 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 enters and ruins the infinity effect, it is happening in real time and is as much of an actor in the overall play of objects as the vases and pebbles and infinity wall.

The strange surface of these photographs comes from a convoluted, pseudo-photographic process I developed especially for them. The casual observer may notice something inspecifically 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’.

Another ongoing project is Roses. These are also photographic works, consisting of glossy photographs of flowers, taken in various municipal parks and private gardens in London in the summer of 2010, printed at a local supermarket photographics ‘lab’ (Kodak printer) and finally tessellated into square or rectangular ‘swatches’. I always meant for them to become wallpaper, not necessarily as prints on a roll of paper but similarly to their current form as individual photographs, cropped and stuck together with tape to form a contiguous wall of flowers. The largest block I have so far made was for a group exhibition that was featured in an episode of the BBC’s Culture Show in a section about the generally negative effects of gentrification in south London. The whole group exhibition was mistakenly titled James Whittingham: The new me by the programme makers (The new me was the title of one of my sculptures).

This tessellation of roses measured approximately 2.5 metres by 4 metres – a mere fragment of my original dream – and cost nearly £200 to make. I realised then that in order to take the work to its logical, installationary conclusion, I would need some extensive grants-based funding. So this project currently exists in swatch form, nine photographs tall/wide, and as hundreds and hundreds of jpegs.

The Roses tessellations exist in the form of a grid. I experimented with the grid form again in a set of paintings called Monochromes. These were designed to fold into easily transportable sizes for ease of shipping to, say, a biennale in, say, Seoul or Taipei. Of course, the biennale would probably organise for artworks to be shipped properly and wouldn’t expect artists to bring everything in their suitcases. Really, I was concerned with the problem of simultaneously being a creator of new art objects and also a conservationist of one’s own work, especially with the kind of itinerant lifestyle I lead. The question of how to make art that is easy to store or, even better, exist without the need to be stored… my work is about prosaic concerns such as this, which at first might seem perverse and against the ethos of high poetry but I think great things can come from it.

The monochromes are made from paper, folded into a grid, which is then painted with layers of watercolours and gouaches, and washed and re-painted, all of which damages the paper, causing it start disintegrating. This leaves people unsure about its history. ‘Were all these rectangles assembled into a painting or was it a continuous whole which is now falling apart?’ they ask.

The 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. Although it doesn’t begin or end like one (there is no Dear Bill or yours lovingly, Dad), I think of the text as a letter, 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, magical aquifers, springs and friendly birds. Boredom never occurs there. 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. This part describes in great detail the superficial look of the grave but precise details about how to geo-reform a small continent (e.g. Australia/Europe) are left out. Instructions on certain minutiae, what plants should be there and what sort of settlement concerning the potential over-commercialisation the hallowed grave of such a hallowed individual and great artistic statesman (i.e. no shops or cafés) are included, as are precise thoughts how to intern the body so A, everyone can see me and B, I don’t rot.

Research

Robert Gober spoke about the moment he thought about using working taps in his sink sculptures. He said he had read critiques of the sink sculptures referring to their having been made by a gay artist and being useless monuments. Then he thought of running taps, ‘working beautifully, almost to excess’. This is a strange comment from him because if something is working to excess it is still somehow not working properly. But I think that’s what he meant. This would be in relation to My island.

Kippenberger’s recently ruined sculpture. His bucket cleaned by a cleaner. ‘Why not just repaint the bucket?’

John Clare’s poems about pre-enclosures-act England.

Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden

Carl Jung, Man and his symbols