What Can I Say?
Review: Emma Talbot: Paintings from my Heart, Transition Gallery 24 April-16 May 2010.
The reason I wanted to review this show was that at first, I felt I couldn’t.
The paintings and drawings that make up the exhibition depict memories from before and the experience after the death of her husband, and are shown in public for the first time since the beginning of this new body of work.
When I first arrived at the exhibition I followed my usual routine of not reading the press release before viewing the works. Looking around at the highly stylized, but aesthetically confident drawings, I increasingly felt that it had become an exercise in a contrived form of naïve, emotional and therefore whimsical (abstract) self-exploration.
The images – maintaining a somber, bruised colour palette – where apparently
stacked on thick, black, horizontal parallel or individual strips of wood; almost like the scrawls and doodles in a characture of a school exercise book. A seemingly random succession of ‘everyday life’ tableaux, erratic emotional explosions of emotion and song lyrics and various permutations of wire mesh and fences took away the possibility of a specific or linear reading.
Fortunately, I kept quiet about my first impressions until after I had read the press-release, who’s first line explained the context for the production of these works.
On re-reading the works, my view having been mediated by a background, it became clear that in one sense it would be difficult to pass an aesthetic or critical judgment: the cathartic content represented in the work nulled any objective questioning; the work was too real, too raw.
The experience of the exhibition became performative in a sense similar to the shockingly real performances of Marina Abramovitch.
This raised for me the broader question of the agency of the artist’s hail – a modified view of the policeman’s hail proposed by Louis Althusser, whereby a subject is implicated as criminal merely by the hail of ‘hey you’ by the police. Thus the ideological relations of society are enacted by physical, material, relations/experience.
In the gallery, the work’s presentation instructs you (as the viewer) to look at it, view it, read it and takes its meaning (especially in the case of documentary or research based artwork). That art continues to be shown in art galleries leads me to be skeptical about the complete freedom of agency of the audience proposed by the notion of death of the author and a birth of the reader (Ranciere J. Emancipated Spectator 2009) a cultural, and therefore ideological hierarchy, still exists.
This is heightened and brought further into question by the highly sensitive subject-matter, moreover the question became, why would the artist want to show this work to strangers? Aside from the obvious catharsis in the production of the individual pieces, why are they then brought into such an arguably confrontational viewing situation?
I would argue that, with the weight of the institutional hail, the artist gains control of our experience of the works by a pre-emptive knowledge of normal social sensitivity to the death of someone’s partner. Perhaps this control of the viewer and reestablishment of the artist’s projected image through a spectacular performance (as Guy Debord would have meant it) then becomes the true catharsis?
It would also seem that this could be symptomatic (to some degree) of all artistic agency, especially when artists deal obviously with ‘real-life’, emotional, social, or political issues? That is by positioning themselves as revelatory or documentative figures –hailing the audience to read what they have made to be viewed – the artist are attempting to dissolve their initial antagonistic relationship to their subject matter by enacting a degree of authoriship on the mediation and therefore understanding it. When the content is so ‘loaded’ how can the audience form their own responsive position, or at least one that is not simply an experience based on recognition?
This sense of unquestionable viewing was brought consciously and immovably into my experience of the show when set against the technical style of the work.
Images that, all deeply personal, ranged from memories presumably of her late husband (with no sense of holding back for personal privacy), the desperate loneliness after his death and the anger and confusion of grief hand written into graphically jarring and unstable grids, were located within personal experience and memory by the choice of her non-representational style. In the drawings the figures’ heads are oversized – almost reminiscent of Manga characters –and the faces are left blank or completely blacked out: the figures are graphically distanced into the safety of symbolism and allusion.
It is this ability of the artist to have complete freedom and autonomy of expression, and hence control over what we, as viewer, are told to read that links to my earlier uncertainty about how one can be truly critical of the image and its aesthetic presentation when: A) the artist is, by exhibiting in a gallery – a known cultural form, hailing the viewer and setting up an ideological hierarchy of knowledge and information.
What then could or should be the viewer’s relationship to images that, have objective potential, but are in fact deeply and emotionally personal? This when, and to not here belittle any aspect of Talbot’s work, the internet and more specifically ‘social networking sites’ afford the user the ability to create an aesthetic experience of their emotions and feelings, in a situation that replicates similar producer-viewer relationship to that of the artist/gallery-viewer.
However, what sets this exhibition apart from the angsty venting of the internet, is it’s brutal yet beautiful honesty, which, behind the veil of aesthetic convention (and through this honesty) allows a much deeper understanding of the artist’s relationship to the process of making, and the experience of socially, emotionally or politically engaged artwork.
