Tag: concept

I’m digging up bodies. 

I have a couple of large-scale landscape-based paintings that I’ve been working on, off and on, for months now. But these weird figurative elements keep popping up. At first I thought it was force of habit – a pointy rock looked like a knee or an elbow only because I’m accustomed to drawing people. Then I thought it was happening because I missed drawing people; moss and leaves are boooring. Then I fished several different paintings out of the pile and propped them up around the studio and realised these references to the body are everywhere. 

There’s things that look like teeth and toenails and blood and knees and bones all over the place. Organs at an autopsy, slick and discoloured. Cracks in a cliff-face look like thighs or cleavage and a feathery, rosy red the colour of mouths and and fingertips seeps from crevices. It might sound really stupid that I didn’t notice I was doing this, but there it is. 

I have a new theory. I’m wondering if these paintings are really an expression of wanting to be able to relate to something beyond my own body. I sometimes wish I could be objective. I wish I could get out of this skin and all its attendant inconveniences I just don’t want to deal with at the moment – gender, sexuality, deficiency, clumsiness. I don’t want to worry about how my own identity affects the work, or how the work is read by others. I don’t want to have to stop painting just because I’m hungry or my joints hurt from crouching. I don’t want to have to drop everything and go find medical supplies because I’m so amazingly clumsy I managed to stab myself in the leg with a Stanley knife and my thigh popped open like a burst zipper. 

Of course, if I didn’t have a body, I couldn’t paint and wouldn’t be interested in painting. I’d be some abstract entity of pure energy, like a rubbish Star Trek special effect, with even less manual dexterity than I have now. But bodies keep encroaching on the canvas in the same way my own body keeps encroaching on my experience of the world. Cramping my style. 

But it’s alright.

Photos are details from three different paintings, all oil on canvas. 

Untitled (abstract), oil on canvas. 20×35". 

I have sympathy for the Wrong. There’s a place in my heart for people throughout history who’ve stuck to some erroneous theory despite the evidence. Like Charles K. Johnson, President of the Flat Earth Society. Or astronomer Fred Hoyle, who couldn’t accept that the universe was expanding, simply because he hated the idea. He actually coined the phrase “Big Bang”, meaning it to be derisive, but others with different sensibilities thought it evocative and punchy and it stuck.

I’m not sure people generally deserve much credit for getting things ‘right’. What gets attributed to insight seems, more often than not, to be a matter of personal taste. Most atheists are not persuaded by logic so much as the idea of logic: they find it beautiful, in the same way that believers are seduced by the romance of religious faith. Obviously even atheism is a leap of faith. You’re operating on an assumption that you can’t know to be true. (That the universe is always logical, for example.) And that’s alright. 

You’re guided by what seems proper to your personal sense of propriety, of elegance. If your mental image of a particular description of reality isn’t convincing – cathartic, possessing some terrible beauty – then you won’t be able to commit. If you find the concept of a spherical Earth inherently ridiculous and unpleasant, no argument will convince you. If the idea of the universe beginning with a dramatic, messy, asymmetrical explosion strikes you as ungainly and embarrassingly theatrical, you’ll spend your whole life finding excuses not to believe in it. All belief, all choice, comes down to aesthetics. 

But I don’t know where one’s notions of beauty come from. I know my standards of physical beauty are constantly shaped and manipulated by external forces. I know I can teach myself to love certain works of art or certain faces over time. But when it comes to more abstract concepts of beauty, it seems more deeply-rooted, more innate, beyond my power to control.

I suppose truly abstract art is one of the few areas where, as a viewer, you’re encouraged to be irrational. You can indulge in your own unfounded prejudices because the artist isn’t making any pre-emptive excuses by giving you certain things to think about. There are no calls on your attention, nothing to mediate your instinctive feeling, nothing to temper your hate or cool your ardour – no story for you to consider, no narrative, no intellectual subtext. You either like what you see or you don’t. And sometimes it is an enormous relief to just look at a painting and say with confidence, “That is a total load of fucking cock." 

That’s what’s scary about making abstract art. Your last line of defence – the artist’s intent – is down. If people don’t like it, you can’t pretend they just don’t get it. I’m getting over that fear. In the past, I’ve always felt apologetic about making paintings that have nothing to say for themselves, like I was pulling a stunt of some sort. If people liked it, I’d feel guilty, like I was getting away with some scam. But I’m over it. I liked making it, I still like it enough not to paint over it, call it a win. 

Manuscripts, pen on paper. (Each 8"x3.5" approx)

Pages of repeating symbols, like an attempt at meditation, investing something insignificant with meaning. Really I was just trying to test/use up old pens but I found the activity soothing, like reciting a mantra. Tacked-on-as-an-afterthought metaphor: you can refer to women as lesser over and over til it seems true, but it remains total nonsense.

I’m on a feminist kick lately. It’s a combination of what I’ve been reading, what’s been in the news lately*, and personal experience (like yesterday, when I tried to stop a guy ramming his girlfriend’s head against a bus window and whispering poison in her ear, telling her she was worthless).

I’m suddenly full of fervour, like a freshly minted evangelist. And I’ve been trying to think clearly about this late-onset anger – this uncharacteristic impulse towards loud, vocal protest. Is it childish? Is it just a rite of passage, like the newly-out lesbian who gets the dykiest haircut she can manage and covers everything she owns in rainbow stickers in the first flush of pride in her new identity? It passes. Maybe I should keep this to myself til I’ve processed it a bit more. After all, what can I possibly have to say on the subject? Honestly, what do I really know about women, or feminism? What meaningful contribution can I make to further the cause of gender equality right now, other than tell the people around me that I’m a feminist and show them, to the best of my ability, what I think that means?

I don’t want to fall into the trap of acting like I’m the first person ever to think about any of these things. (I’m pretty sure every time a new feminist polemic is published, Germaine Greer just flings her hands up in exasperation, going “You guys, that’s what I’ve been SAYING!”) Maybe if I spend the next 20 years reading and distilling my anger into something crystal clear and precise, I might have some insight to offer. 

So in the meantime, I’m trying to find a more considered, understated and intelligent way to express some of these ideas.

Because that’s what I am, “too tasteful,” as a tutor once sneered.

In this case I think it’s going to mean abstracting the idea of feminism a bit, using a broader or more academic sense of the word gender (as in gendered looking: perspectival, partial) and exploring how position determines perception. The alternative at this point would probably be smearing a canvas with the word “RRAAARRGH” daubed in menstrual blood. I don’t want to be that person. So we’ll see how this works out. 

*There is one point I’d like to make about the media furore surrounding the maid at the centre of the “DSK” rape case in New York. I hate that even though no one is challenging the physical evidence, her credibility as a witness is shot because she apparently lied about some things that were completely unrelated to the case. As if she therefore deserved to be raped, or that there can be no occasion for a trial. Can I just say what in God’s balls? I lied about stealing candy sticks from my brother when I was about six. Did I thereby forfeit my right to my own body, my personhood? Did I just give some misogynistic git a free pass? Every time I tell a lie, a rapist gets his wings? What, in short, the fucking fuck?

You can get a really warped idea of what women are like from magazines. No one I know is anything like the type of woman that magazines – men’s or women’s -expect women to be or aspire to. I don’t know why that is or what that means.

There are lots of artists (from Artemisia Gentileschi to Sarah Lucas) who have made a point of messing around with the way women are popularly presented and perceived. I’m not sure I have much to contribute to that conversation but here are some drawings I made mostly based on photoshoots from fashion magazines. I’ve mixed feelings about these sorts of images. On the one hand, they’re just beautiful illusions, meant to be enjoyed and disposed of. On the other, women are not.

Like most of my generation, I’m tired of these stupid battles for equality (of gender, race, culture, sexuality) and feel like they should have been won years ago, so I’m seriously losing patience with anything that might be holding us back. Like these tiresome, vapid, slick, ubiquitous images that dehumanise and objectify women for no good reason. (You don’t have to make anyone feel inadequate just to sell clothes. People need clothes.)

Then again, I don’t know which is actually worse, the hyper-sexualised, etiolated, airbrushed girls in the glossies, or the sour, harrowed-looking creatures that inhabit those trashy “True Life” rags with headlines like “Psychic Goldfish Cured My Cancer” or “I Married a Wall”. It’s a pity there doesn’t seem to be a middle ground. Where are all the real girls? 

Pencil sketches + colour added in Photoshop. 

These two were specifically made for the “Queer as Political” exhibition currently running at The Other Place in Cork city. Til now, I’ve really never made explicitly political work, but for once I have something I want to say out loud.

“Corrective rape” is the nauseating term given to the targeted rape of lesbians by men who seek to punish those women for their sexuality. It is currently rife in South Africa, despite a progressive legal constitution that even permits same-sex marriage. Noxolo Nogwaza (24) and Eudy Simelane (31) were each gang-raped, mutilated, stabbed and beaten to death for being gay and speaking openly in defence of gay rights. There have been many others.

Irish society, meanwhile, is comparatively liberal but still unequal. Women and lesbians are still taught the message that their bodies are not their own; that their desires and choices are not valid unless they conform to restrictive notions of femininity. I’m struggling to find a way to speak coherently about the misogynistic, homophobic influences that still permeate our supposedly liberal society but the idea behind these two paintings was to express this basic message: that if you think casual sexism or anti-gay slurs are harmless, you’re just not thinking. Read about what happens when you take this attitude to its logical extreme and consider whether you mind that you’re a part of the problem.

Correction 1 (Double Portrait) and Correction 2: Both pieces watercolour/mixed media on paper, 16×20".

For more information about the deaths of Noxolo and Eudy, try here and here.