As contemporary image makers I think Crewsdon and Rauch are in the same mode.

They are both products of an approach which seeks to find the unique properties of their medium (be it painting or photography) but which borrows liberally from other art forms in this quest. Filmaking, collage, graphics, advertising are all disciplines which inform their practise.

 In both cases they seek a certain kind of narrative. They are fully aware of the limits and tendencies of narrative in still images. They avoid the temptation to play literature at the game of unfolding a story over time. Instead they make the most of the causal ambiguity inherant in the stilled moment.

For both artists the narratives are always of a poetic sort. That is we are but into a situation where the mood, the drama, the sense of tension are palpably present. Yet the specific nature and context of the scene is not completely clear. How a figure relates to its surrounding, how the various parts combine to a coherent whole and what has happened before or will happen after are unclear.

 The lack of clairty is played upon to give a heightened sense of tension and unease. Crewsdon’s work, for instance, could come straight form a scene in American Beauty or Magnolia. It like some Hooperesque image  but modernised and laced in excess.

In both cases we are left with the sense that this is a point of dramatic tension. That something is on the verge of collapsing, imploding or to be revealed. The moments, in Rauchs particuarly, are constantly left in a state of flux, as if everything could collapse in front of our eyes.

For Rauch’s saturated and unreal colour range read Crewsdon’s move style lighting. They are the formal tools they use to find theatre. It is theatre (in terms of performance, play and a sense of tragedy) which is the central tennant linking their practise.

 A poem that was recently brought to my attention…

Muséé des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

W.H. Auden

The single figure always refers to another, whether that other is absent or present. The figures desire, actions are defined by this other.

 This does not necessarily root painting in narrative, although it does imply a causal link between the central character and other facets.

Such a link can be establish on the grounds of a justification which exists outside of the linear nature of literay time. The panic, the state, the impact can be a permanent condition brought on by the other. It need no be the direct effect resulting from a previous cause. The two are symbiotic rather than intrinsically linked in a historic hierachy.

The protagonist, I am suggesting, need not precede the victim. There states can both exist in the eternal now, the moment of flux, which the painting deals with.

On another note, we need no depict the protagonist. We only need focus on the ‘victim.’ The protagonists prescence or existence can be suggested by an unseen ofstage prescence. Hints of exists or doorways can potentially imply this.

Exhibition catalogue- Kapellmeister Pulls A Doozy.

Mary sat perplexed, “why, where, when? The solution seems incommunicable. Hmm, is there even a solution?” The people whizz by my window, their faces fuzzy, like dots on one of those old analogue TV’s, can’t seem to focus, can’t see who they are or what they’re thinking. I can’t even see their eye’s, why am I asking myself this?

The sun has moved inexorably along its path and can now be seen glowing, or is that glowering, through my window? Mary was writing something in a pad, on a desk. The day started in a strange mood, the sun appeared to glower through the gap in his curtains as he chewed, deep in thought, on the end of a pencil.Yep, it was definitely glowering. Her scrawl was mesmerising, the type of handwriting they only had in the old days. You don’t see that type of writing these days. People just don’t take the time to practice anymore. Mary screwed up the piece of paper and threw it on the floor, it landed neatly next to another ball of paper and quickly made friends. Read the rest of this entry »

A window points to depth

A wall reflects and absorbs flatness

All thats in the frame passes before being reached

 All ascribed to the crumbling surface is soaked up in a dry mouth

Idealism has depth

Realism has flatness

The place is flat

The Journey has depth

Love is depth and desire it flatness Read the rest of this entry »

 I have been browsing through a series of old family photographs recently. Each has a different impact. Here I am with my two elder sisters in America, on a trip to Dsiney Land. i believe I am about five.

 This is one of a few photographs which fills me with a certain melancholy. My instinct is to link this to some simplisitc phycological cause; perhaps the imminant divorce of my parents, the last ties to the nucelar family of my early childhood. In reality this does not feel honest, the sadness is both more poigniant and more ambiguous than that. Read the rest of this entry »

Tragedy is not singular. Each artform has its own form of tragedy, as does life itself. Lifes tragedy is obvious, the inevitability of death as a consequence of birth.

Narrative, literary, tragedy is the closest to this. Moving through time and space it necessitates plot. The tragedy in narrative is always tied up in cause and effect. What will happen is an inevitable consequence of what is happening, the end is defined by the start.

Photographic tragedy is different. The photograph is about a moment in reality which had been. Its static nature only focus our attention on the inevitable death of the moment recorded. It is not held in eternity but killed and embalmed. Photography is never about idealism but the depressing realism, the shadow of reality. Its oppositions are tragic reminders of lifes tragic transcience. Read the rest of this entry »

Everything divides into opposites

It all decomposes into mapable coordinates

Composed artificially for need of idealism

These constructs are ascribed to our particular psyche

The imprint of a repetitive history

Never intrinsic but forcing its way beneath the skin

The vertical is male Read the rest of this entry »

The hero is dead

The hero is the figure of idealism

The tragic hero is the romantics hero and ICarus its king

The fall was the tragic hero’s motif

Tragedy is about inevitability

The fall is the inevitable conclusion of the rise

The desire to fall comes from the unfulfilled desire to rise

Tragic heroism is measured in the total distance travelled

Tragic heroism always ends where it started

Tragic heroism befitsliterautre

it has a linear narrative

upwards and then downwards through space and time

All we have left is the desire for the hero

The desire for heroism has no narrative

The desire for heroism is static

It desire movement through space and time

It desires the rise that necessitates the fall

It remains attached to the base level

Twitching and squirming at best

The hero is dead

Tragedy is dead

only unfulfilled desire is left

An image of group exercise is a powerful one.  It unsettles.  Why is this?

Perhaps it reveals something about ourselves that we don’t necessarily want to accept, and when we look upon this fact from the outside it appears stupid to us.

Is there a clue within this image as to how we can best utilize painting as an artform?  The same effect would not be achieved through writing because writing forces us to see through anothers eyes.  It is the homeland of opinion.  Painting, whilst not being as democratic as photography, is certainly more democratic than writing.  Because it doesn’t have this voice dictating opinion onto us, painting is perfectly placed to make this kind of comment.  Essentially painting has a limited area in which it can function to its fullest potential, but it is best when it is like a mirror held up to humankind.  Photography in turn cannot have this ability because at heart the photographers eye is a naive eye.  A painting gains power through its deliberateness in the choices made.

This is a terrible post, i’ve just read it back.

But in there is something that almost makes sense, so i’ll leave it.  What the hell.