Photo by: Gigi KaliskyPublished here on the CSM Website (link)
The Sandra Blow Lecture: Vanessa Jackson Stolen & Contaminated – the form, the function and the ornament.
Review by Tom Clark.
Providing context and theoretical ‘justification’ for her practice, Vanessa Jackson’s lecture was a wide reaching journey through art history and the continued influence of geometry and system in visual and physical experience.
I approached this lecture somewhat wary of her particular use of phenomenology and abstraction but it was interesting to see how these questions intersected with her continued, and unchanged practice in our over-developed and culturally available contemporary context.
For me, the most interesting aspect of the talk arose out of her ritualistic use of abstraction and geometric form. She noted how, at the beginning of her practice, abstraction seemed to provide a transcendental democracy, balancing the velocity of modernity[1] and ideas in the highly politicised art school of the early 1970s. Now, this seems outmoded and by her own admission ‘somewhat unable’ to fully deal with the current context.
Despite her own attempts, using phenomenology and “democratic’” (in what she describes as a “trans-cultural” sense) abstract geometric aesthetics to decontextualize and therefore democratize the content of the paintings, abstraction now has an established art history. It is recognisable and culturally referential, its loss of radical potential is explored by Peter Halley in his 1984 article for Arts Magazine ‘The Crisis in Geometry.’[2] In a particularly ironic example; the same systems of geometry artists used to legitimize their practice were also those cited by Michel Foucault[3] as the organizational system for surveillance and social confinement.
Moreover, though this is testament to the lecture’s depth and negotiation of information, Jackson’s ability to link sources and ‘culturally sample’ (as was seen here) is now more symptomatic of a system that properly developed after the first wave of avant garde: that is, the world wide web. The Internet is designed to be flexible, rhizomatic and chaotic; something which, it appears, sits uneasily with Jackson’s continued exploration of experience using a rigidly specified two-dimensional painting praxis.
In a way this perhaps stems from her early experience of conceptualism. Her research and the systems of its access and organisation outstrip the ritualized and distinct ‘rules’ of her practice. The geometric forms in the work lend themselves to the more traditional examples of illusion and ornament in the lecture’s accompanying slide show, which, only occasionally matched up with what was said. Seemingly, like her paintings, they attempting to float above theory and cultural context.
In spite of my initial reservations I enjoyed the lecture, not least for its demonstration of the continued instability of the authorial image when sourced from and placed amongst the networks and systems of contemporary information and cultural exchange. In its continuity the work allows this morphing of context to become evermore apparent, and articulates the increasing difficulty of providing an abstract, geometric resolution to the plurality of visual experience.
