I find my appreciation of time-based art easy, if not oppressed. Its tendency to capture and manipulate the viewer in darkened seated rooms is a bit like watching tv. I find the installation, which works on my senses like a day out at the fun-fair (I’m like a child in a sweet shop) not unlike like the frustrating pleasure of catching the fading morning memories of what seemed an all too vivid dream. The installation has a sense of devil-may-care about it, it's hard to take seriously most of the time, and there aren't any rules. It often seems neurotic, unbalanced, fixated, hysterical. It may consist of endless shelves of knick-knacks, splices of film in loops, bits of tv, photos, spillages are popular, coloured abstractions of light, darkness, sculpture, sound, often bean-bags to enhance the viewing pleasure.
My viewing of a show of paintings (canvases, boards hung on walls) however, is generally a more impatient affair. A show of paintings is unequivocally more robust, accountable. It delivers a set of viewing rules which I must manipulate and measure: I stride past the less-than-eye-catching, stand back agog at the monumental, wander through rooms of irksome dullness, or inspect too closely (now I’m an arbiter of the craft before me) the texture of the pigment’s application, in order perhaps to extract a message in the gesture of the brushwork, perhaps even to detect something of the artist’s soul (whatever that is) undressed in the microscopic lumpen physicality before me. But I'm usually in a hurry with paintings. Perhaps in order to complete the tour, my negotiations of the gallery are akin to a thumbing through, the equivalent of idling through a magazine. I want to have it over and done with. Without a narrative, the viewing seems time consuming, the plot wanders off course, and here's my reservation: I might have better digested the work at home, or on the train, whilst flicking through the catalogue. Here I would have given the pieces a different type of time, allowed the pages to sit open, perhaps whilst I made a coffee, maybe returning to the image, looking up, listening, glancing at something else, dipping in again, in short, adding my own narrative, the covers of the catalogue the beginning and the end of a time of viewing mapped out before me, perhaps the turning of the pages as pleasurable as the images, the transit more gripping that the getting there.
Today, I’m in a gallery in Bethnal Green; I’m wandering amongst a new collection of charcoal drawings and earlier painted works by artist George Shaw, the Smiths obsessed Humbrol painter. Of course, I admire the technical skill displayed in the laying-down of colour, in the rendering of this industrial, glossy metallic medium into delicious fields of tone and hue; I imagine the charming painterly language of gesture which the preliminary sketches are sure to exude. The compositions are alluring, the colour palettes familiar, I recognise the common and repeating subject matter (streets like sixties film sets, housing estates, wasteland, woods) which have formed the focus of this body of work, since its birth in the mid 1990’s.
But whilst I amble through the show, the familiar urban landscapes and bleak broken woods strike up within me a recognisable and almost bilious sense of toxic monumentality. There is something that is without this work that unsettles me, something, in absence, which unbalances any comfortable percolation of pleasure. I find myself in a fit of exquisite mourning for a place, for a world, where I wonder... have I ever been? The unihabitedness, the lonely aspect of the work has been much documented, but the emptiness in these scenes is deceptive. Theses scenes are not vacuous, these landscapes, tower blocks, and terraces of Coventry's Tile Hill (like the urban jungle of Derek Jarman's 'The Queen is Dead' video for The Smiths) are populated at the very moment we think we observe their vacancy. It is the invitation to enter their painted vanishing worlds which ports us from the now, draining from us the certainty of today as if it was nothing more than an expression of romantic pathos, a once removed melancholy for a world that doesn't care.
Like the sweetest pain of remembering lost, cherished times, of the absent lover who does not call, now vanished, exhausted, undone, a memory re-lived in absence, these paintings unwrap scenarios, replay, dress up and mimic what was once keenly sensed. Our engulfment lies in the tension, faded, half recognised, that those times are slipping out of grasp, and in over-reaching, perhaps for the last time, we slip, we trip and fall. In the emptiness, beyond the city horizon, in the deep dark wood, there is a light that never goes out, and it flickers on relentlessly through the ephemeral moments captured like film stills in Shaws images, manipulating absence, extending the interval and hovering at the agonising moment when everything we cherish might topple sharply from absence, into death, as we turn the final tortured pages of a book we wished would never end.
