return to worldwidereview.com,
the home of critical reviews
From: Clementine Walnut
Category: Art
Date: 12 September 2008
Time: 02:37 PM
Review:
If borgeious culture is "economy" becoming "symbolic" , the portrait effectively describes the various
modes of being available to individuality within "economy."One might turn to it for conceptions of how
a culture might map its various conceptions of identity, though the sheer narrowness of work on offer
here suggests this show represents the cultural interest of a narrow class of the English
bourgeiousie,a class whose interests reside in precisely the opposite of what the portrait has
traditionally offered. This class celebrates itself not through its personality but strangely, through its
lack of identity, and this finds its expression in portraiture which attempts to make a virtue of
withholding its own personality. This is art without character, without subjectivity,without interiority, and
rhetorically configures the human as residing within a condition of pure exteriority, wholly objectified.
The work in this show all acquiesces to the protestant dream; the curtailment of libido, the death of
desire, the freezing of spontanaiety and the annihilation of "jouissance". It fills this void with a mode of
representation that effectively polices the surface of each painting,with the sitters distilled through a
kind of panoptic lens in which every tiny detail must be made evident and exteriorised, every gesture
frozen into its full , ominous banality. This is painting that ,in every sense of the word, is truly arrested.
A double portrait of two academics at London University,long married ,undoubtedly
bitter,winsome smiles an unconvincing mask.This picture allowed me a clearer focus on what is
meant by the word "stuffiness"-.they are surrounded by objects that symbolise their interests-that old
trick.The winner, a head of a woman, revealing nothing of her personality, blown into monstrous
proportions, its anonymity defeaning.A touch of Little Britain- two old bags fight it out in the kitchen,
the painting an eye watering accumulation of hard edged detail even down to the exact rendering of a
TV remote control. A self portrait of a middle aged greying welshman, that took him sixteen years to
complete due to the "difficult combination of natural and artificial light".
The work in this exhibition represents a particular art historical cul-de -sac; the grafting of
techniques and modes of representation traditionally associated with still life painting onto the genre
of portrait. The artists in this exhibition all treat the portrait as nature mort, with an emphasis on the
mort. That an art historical genre associated with the accumulation and display of purely material
things should so easily and uncritically be harnessed to the depiction of the human is revealing of the
particular contradictions and paradoxes of the modern English bourgeious mind set. Forced after
centuries of coercion to accept the economic as the natural, unable to articulate any language of
resistance to its forces, or to conceptualise the personality in terms other than that of pure
acquiesence( conformity, not rebellion, in England, is where moral urgency is to be located) , we find
in this exhibition, the true expression of the soul of middle England: its autistic inability to see beyond
the surface appearance, or even to understand why that might be desirable.
Whilst some of these artists may complain publically about their apparent neglect at the hands
of the art establishment, in fact , they already have a museum in central London catering to their
needs, and representing their interests: interests that are in fact retrogressive, banal and
tasteless.Those members of the public who, cut from the same cloth, imagine this work represents
the triumph of simple skill over complicated conceptualisation, are simply ignorant of the notion ,
central to art, of aesthetic judgement.Without judgement, skill has no value at all, but then again,
judgement has no place in economy, and if economy is the natural, then logically the aesthetic must
be the artificial. So paradoxically, this genre of work, the most deep frozen in contemporary art, is
held up for its authenticity- but nothing could be further from the truth.