Lump It or Use It: CSM Degree Show review 2010

Bare Life (2010), Clementine McGaw, Oil and Gloss on Canvas

For the penultimate time 140 students showed a bewilderingly disparate body of works over 6 floors of the Charing Cross Road site. With an unhindered approach to media the students focused on physical forms of representation and mediation; theoretically (and unsurprisingly) tending towards; geo politics, national and personal identity, nostalgia and history, images and looking, processes of production, gender/sexual politics etc etc.

Given its size there are two ways I could try and make sense of this show (1). Work successful in its critical engagement, and, work that was financially successful. This apparently cynical separation helps to make sense of the visual mass and diversity of work on show this year.

Traditional representation and repetition of contemporary cultural space and objects meant that the painters sold best, with paintings restrained in their appearance and content proving to be most popular.

Although the appreciation of the work easiest on the eye irritated me –perpetuating a conservative and cynical idea of what art has to offer – it is actually quite interesting, especially when looking at these paintings alongside more critically or at least (overtly) culturally engaged works.

Despite being paintings of things with their narrow, sombre colour palette, deft paint-ground relationship these works trod a fine line between abstraction and representation.

As the works attempt to emulate the visual reduction of abstraction they become what Boris Groys refers to as weak signs (2). By avoiding overt, brash, spectacular or symbolic didacticism (a strong sign) they appear empty and inconsequential seemingly to loose specific cultural or temporal location: to become trans-historical.

Yet this is looking at historical Avant-Garde abstraction. In these paintings’ ultramodern context, continuing weak painting they mimic the ephemeral allure of the contemporary lifestyle market (ironically the subject matter in some of Alexander Clarke’s work). They are symptomatic of the ultramodern, which, through its implication of the scarcity of time (e.g. Instant messaging, Social network updating and advertising campaigns such as Microsoft’s “The New Busy”) initiates this desire for transcendence in the first place.

So not only does the visual experience of the paintings run counter to the act of painting of weak images as transcendence, in being weak they readily slide back into and become part of their cultural symptom. This is then perhaps why they sell so well.

While visual content can be critical by association to contemporary society, the question then resurfaces: what is the point of painting when the art market is under such criticism and the future of cultural institutions is so uncertain?

Analogue representational concepts of origin and mimesis have been superseded by the digital experience. Images can now be altered, collaged, and appropriated regardless of physical cultural, geographical, or theoretical origin.

Simply using the historically transformative power of painting to transcend mass visual culture misunderstands the digital experience of the image, arguably propagating an unhealthy disassociation with the sociological role of visual culture in the mediation of ideology.

This nostalgic tactic wasn’t however universal; the show’s most successful works momentarily high-jacked these resistant real world physical cultural forms or critically engaged with an understanding of contemporary digital-analogue visual relationships, that the internet has begun to constitute, to provide a new view point on culturally entrenched and seemingly innocuous forms.

Jammie Nicholas’ perfume project Surplus: eau de toilette (2010) THE SUN IS BUT ONE ANUS demonstrated this critical diversion through the process of art making, importantly maintaining a product perfectly believable in it’s branding, application and sale.

You learn from the artist’s sales assistant that the perfume is distilled from (amongst other excreta) the artist’s shit, though chemically no different to the base elements of perfume he makes use of the social demarcations of use and waste values of specific objects to open up a crack in the highly efficient luxury goods market.

The distillation machine alongside acts as a visual decoy prompting you to look beyond the recognisable appearance of the perfume.
Whilst putting the allure of spectacle to good effect it also, through the mechanisms of its production, marketing and sale proposes questions about consumption and excess, and the social relations of commodities, it smells pretty convincing too.

StrangMacfarlane’s series of 10 prints played this diversionary game slightly closer to the wind. Treading a fine line between advertising posters and art prints they are not such an obviously critical piece of work. This was though to the work’s advantage, it’s critical subtlety helped engage it with the sophistication and agility of contemporary advertising.

1-10 (detail) (2010), StrangMacfarlane, Mixed media. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Variations on a single theme each work, often beligerently, authoritative but reassuringly conversive questioned the viewer about their relation to various cultural forms. This dialogue referred to itself, the context of viewing and the interaction between the viewer, artist and often – by self-reference to StrangMacfarlane- the idea of branding.

They also seemed to be the most popular works. Charmingly obnoxious, with again an intelligent use of spectacle the works were attractive in precisely the same way as the visual branding and marketing the works were irreverently interrogating. They engendered recognition by false visual equivalence, using a post-Postmodernist freedom of mediation and manipulation to create an investigative and critical dialogue out of the cultural forms themselves.

And so, by looking at the works that sold well and those that were more critically engaged (3) together, the plethora of media and references in the show begins to clarify. The works navigate the relationship between analogue and digital mediation to the visual, informational and contextual overload that has accompanied development of the Internet. The digitized standardization of its omnipresence has resulted (4) in two main methodologies.

Firstly those whose perhaps nostalgic relationship to traditional media such as painting and sculpture never really resolves their relationship to the unknown, but seems to give momentary financial relief. These more sellable works are desirable precisely because of this nostalgia. By being weak signs; contextually cross-culture and only affected by a simple re-mediation – or semi abstraction – the paintings cynically align themselves with the micro authorship of digital cultural phenomenon such as Facebook, tumbr, blogging. But, with its promotion/ performance of self the paintings simply maintain the visual entropy of these forms.

Secondly there are those who have made a critical engagement with the contradictory relationship between highly digitised mediation and the physical objects that moves amongst a supposed real world-virtual separation. What is most interesting about these works is their similarity to their cultural contextual origin: in an updated form of relational aesthetics that does away with the sense that a hierarchical social situation set up by an artist can provide emancipatory transcendence, using a realist, representational, version where the recognisable objects/forms/content act as decoys to manipulate conventional understandings of material forms and relations via the mediation by the artist. Recognisable objects become critical in their difference, rather than celebratory in it.

This seems to have positive potential. An actual interstice (5) that by being a decoy and enlisting spectacle avoids the initial moralistic superiority/utopian blindness that socially engaged works risk implicating.

Tom Clark 2010

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(1) Though this will also be prefaced by my experience of being based in the 2D pathway –painting, photography, drawing etc, but having developed a practice that seeks to put apart traditional understandings of the image and its forms within society.

(2) The Weak Universalism (2010) available at: e-flux.com/journal/view/130

(3) The best critical works also sold well not least because of their well thought out mimicry of existing consumable forms.

(4) Notwithstanding the fact that this cohort are one of the first of a seminal few generations whose lives have been bracketed by the rapid and exponential development of the internet, with a blurry understanding of life without it.

(5) To update a term Nicolas Bourriaud used to reinforce relational aesthetics.