Exploring the current show at the Hayward, ‘Walking In My Mind’, is a genuinely fun exhibition, but rather than feeling like a trip to the fun-fair, it is fun in a challenging and mentally active way. Observing the delighted children running around, I even think it’s a ‘fun for all the family’ show, but without being watered down for that privilege. How is this possible? It’s like eating as much cake as you like, but getting healthier, rather than fatter, in the process. I’m going to give my explanation in terms of reading it as that most accessible type of exhibition, a self-portrait exhibition. However, throughout this show there cannot be found a single depiction of any of the artist’s figure or face. Somehow, this has allowed it to shed a lot of the calorific clichés that accompany contemporary painted portraits. First, then, we’ll detour into the world of how we read painted portraiture, and what form these clichés take. ‘‘A man’s face is his autobiography, a woman’s face is a work of fiction.’’ Despite its indefensible sexism, Oscar Wilde perfectly sums up the two clichés of reading portraits: between what is genuine about a face, and what is self-consciously displayed. These two readings are the poles of an old dialectic between truth and deception, depth and surface, scars and make-up. One can organise these two clichés on a scale of cliché, which I call the Bacon-Warhol scale. At the extreme Francis Bacon pole are portraits which are all scars; and at the extreme Andy Warhol pole are portraits which are all make-up. I apologise for attaching these oversimplified readings to the complex and vast oeuvre of these artists, but we’ll live with this for this purpose of defining our scale.
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Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Bacon’s paintings is very helpful for defining the extreme end of the Bacon-pole. Deleuze believes that Bacon’s project as a portrait painter is ‘to dismantle the face, to rediscover the head or make it emerge from beneath the face.’1 That is, Bacon wipes out any signifiers of the face, and recovers what the face usually hides- a head as a material set of organs without individuating features - a place where all make-up is lost to blood and froth. Andy Warhol, on the other hand, does the opposite. He eliminates the physical aspect of a portrait, leaving only a flat surface for a face. Looking at his series of Marilyns, he makes this face an abstraction, which, by being repeated in series, is treated like a symbol. Like a symbol, Marilyn is defined socially, and any hint at an underlying truth to this individual hidden beneath the social has been eliminated. This is how Warhol presented himself: ‘If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my pictures and films and me. There’s nothing behind it.’2 By taking two extremes, there is an absence in each portrait. Bacon’s portraits are anti-social recluses, there is a material presence there, but there is no-one engaging with us form that presence. With Warhol it’s the opposite, the portrait is like someone far too good at socialising and dependent upon it. They are able to maintain consistent polite conversation, but they’re vacuous idiots interested only in networking and asserting their own identity. Whereas’ Bacon’s portraits are meant to be an isolated kernel of truth, Warhol portraits are empty shells - the lights are on, but no-one’s home.
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Looking at contemporary painted portraits always feels a bit embarrassing, because they can never seem to escape from this clichéd scale. For example, the winner of this year’s BP portrait award, Peter Monkmann, said of the winning portrait of is daughter: ‘I challenge the fixed notion of an idealised image of childhood and substitute it for a more unsettling, complex, representation that exists in its own right as a painting.’3 In other words, the picture is ¾ Bacon, ¼ Warhol. It keeps an identity, that of childhood, but twists it into something supposedly deep, complex, and unnerving. Not that it’s a bad portrait, it’s just interpreting it on its own terms feels a little cringe-worthy, and there appears to be no way of engaging with it on an enjoyable level that excludes this cringe. But that sticky feeling seems to disappear when reading the Walking in My Mind installations as portraits. Before I conclude by offering a reason why this might be so, I’ll try explain my point by giving some reading of the work that, were they for painted portraits, would only be suitable for pseuds-corner. Yoshimoto Nara definitely got bullied at school. His reaction to this was to escape into his own alice-in-wonderland like world. The skylight window seems open to cows, moons and spoons and such things. Its all very sweet, and a powerful contrast to Keith Tyson’s neighbouring installation. While Nara looks down at his drawings while his mind is in the cloud, Keith has to look up at his oppressive work. His large and varied paintings are like the crammed obsessional posters of a lonely teenage boy’s bedroom. Although rather than being obsessed with football, wrestling or ear-splitting rock music, Keith consumes himself with his own schizoid thoughts- I think it’s time we had a talk about Keith.
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Thomas Hirschhorn and Charles Avery are barely more socialised individuals. Both are anti-social nerds at heart. Hirshhorn’s room hasn’t been cleaned since he moved in. He’s the lazy, grungy history undergrad who spouts too much theory and is too good at Guitar-Hero. Avery’s clinical displays behind glass cases are a world removed from the half-arsed duck tape of Hirschhorn. Whilst Hirschhorn plots revolution, is Avery is plotting Dungeons and Dragons; and whilst Hirschhorn is reading up on Adorno and Habermas, Avery is high on Doctor Who and Terry Pratchett. Jason Rhodes, has grown-up a bit more physically and mentally, but hasn’t gone anywhere. He slouches in the stagnant detritus of his apartment watching countdown and feeding himself on cheap porn. However, the decapitated snake atop a docked toy train in the centre of the installation suggests he is spent in this regard. He makes an odd couple with Bo Christian Larsson, who probably styles his hair too much. He poses like a dandy or a Dalí; he’s well studied, and can converse on a range of subjects, and whilst passing the port to the left he’ll spout out quotes from Joyce’s Ulysses - what a charmer. The less said about Mark Manders the better. When you were at school, he was the quiet one at the back who, instead of listening to the teacher, slowly dissected insects before eating them. He does have his charm, which is oddly both sick and cute at the same time; but looking at how unfilled his room appears, it does looks as if he hasn’t done his homework.
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Chiaharu Shiota and Yayoi Kusama are paired like two dramatic masks. Shiota is the tragic one. She is like a child character in a Stephen King novel, fucked up forever by traumatically terrifying experiences. Now after months of screaming in the middle of the night how ghastly dresses from her dead mother’s wardrobe are eating her liver, she was thrown into an asylum. She probably met Kusuma there (who does actually live voluntarily in an asylum). As the comic mask, Kusama’s vivacity is irrepressible. Her dots cover everything infinitely in all directions, and have spread outside into London, first onto a garden terrace and further onto the trees of the southbank. They’ll eventually consume everything like a jazzy grey goo. Pipilotti Rist was my final stop before the Hayward’s bookshops. Her room was dark and starry like a disco. But without music. Or dancing. Or pissed people. ‘I am a molecule’ She sings to me, while a picture of a big tit bounces around the room. A foot, an ear and a penis follow, accompanied by Rist’s singing ‘You am a butterflower’, ‘a mouse’, ‘a polyp’, and ‘a molecule’. How encouraging. Rist definitely dances by herself in her bedroom, but more like a kind of sway than a dance. As much as I could read into other portraits, Rist remains an unfathomable personality. She’s probably painfully beautiful.
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OK, so maybe most of that was unforgivably for pseuds corner, but I still enjoyed doing it, whilst I wouldn’t have done for painted portraits. I think its because this show neither presents a Bacon-like kernel of truth to these artists, nor a Warholian social shell of a person. Instead it feels like walking round a shell, which is also a truth – similar to inspecting someone’s bedroom which hasn’t been prepared for guests. This was the form of Tracey Emin’s portrait-installation, My Bed. But the work doesn’t aim for the controversy that this work did. Rather, its unashamedly open to interaction and play rather than confrontation. Eventually it might all become cliché. But for now, I’ll have my cake, and eat it. 1 Gilles Deleuze: Francis Bacon. Continuum. London. p. 15 2 Andy Warhol, quoted in The Return of the Real, by Hal Foster. The MIT press. Massachusetts. 1996. p, 130. 3 Peter Monkman quoted on the NPG website: http://www.npg.org.uk/bp-portrait-award-20091/the-exhibition/prize-winners-home.php
Andy Murray
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