I am interested in co-incidences and
synchronicity: in how and why we project our inner world onto our outer world
and the how we make sense of, or try to fathom, those two positions, as well as the interplay and tensions between our conscious
and unconscious minds.
Is it a co-incidence that I keep going to
see work by people who work with the idea of montage, with collage or simply
cutting out and pasting shapes, physically and by placing different styles and
media together?
I did not notice the date when I set out on
the 21st of May. However, it
was in fact my late father’s birthday and he would very much have enjoyed
visiting the exhibition with me despite his painful feet and inability to stand
for very long.
I mention my father because his death seems
to have been the trigger for the beginning of my photographic odyssey. Shortly before he died he mentioned how much
he admired a photograph I took, and which was framed for me by my
ex-husband. The night he died, unbeknownst
to me at the time, I dreamed that that photograph was no longer on the wall and
in the dream the sense of its absence was overwhelmingly troubling to me. Utter nothingness where once there was something. The
next day I rang the police when I could not get hold of my father and they discovered
that he had died in quite strange circumstances less than 24 hours previously –
the night I had had my very powerful dream.
Photography, my father’s death and the new
direction I have taken in life are all in my mind connected.
What is more, Richard Hamilton’s work spans
from the late 40s to 2011. My father was
born in 1939 and died in 2011. Because Hamilton’s work can, I think, be read as
a ‘social documentary’ of those years, as a commentary on British preoccupations,
mood and changing attitudes, it seems intrinsically connected to the world in
which my father lived.
******
Although Hamilton is not primarily a
photographer, he was interested in and utilized photography in his work, not
only in preparatory work but also as a medium in itself. There are lots of photographic works in the
exhibition, which contains over 200 altogether, and also includes installation,
painting, print, film and sculpture. I
tend to focus on installation in this written work.
Hamilton was born in 1922 and died in
2011. He was English but more than any
other British artist, ‘associated with international colleagues’,
‘a champion of Marcel Duchamp in the post-war era, he befriended and
collaborated with American and European artists from Roy Lichtenstein to Dieter
Roth.’ Hamilton studied at Slade following a
succession of jobs in advertising, design and production after leaving school at
14.
I know virtually nothing about Pop Art (to
be honest I’m beginning to comprehend that I know virtually nothing at all and
have a growing awareness of a hideous sense of ignorance which with everything
I learn becomes grows greater and can’t possibly be overcome sufficiently in the
remaining 30, maybe 40 years if I’m lucky, that I have left – it’s annoying; my
fractured un-education is annoying.) Hamilton is, I have read, understood to be the
founding father of this movement – I think I might have assumed it was Warhol
but perhaps he is merely the most populist of the pop artists.
There is an enormous body of work in the
exhibition – it really is quite prolific - so I will discuss a small selection
of those that I found most interesting here:
Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different
and appealing? 1956,
which was a collage to be used in the catalogue representing an installation
called, The ‘fun house’, one of twelve
in the This is tomorrow exhibition
held at the Whitechapel gallery as part of a collective, referred to as ‘the
now infamous icon of Pop Art’(although I have struggled to discover why infamous), instantly reminded me of
Hoch’s work (again!) which I’d seen at the Whitechapel a few months ago.
The collage for me contains a great deal of
humour with its pastiche of Adam and Eve, and contains a number of contemporary
aspirational objects such as a vacuum cleaner, tape player, television, and a
tinned ham (I remember eating that!). I’m
not sure if the ham is meant to indicate what I see as the ‘ theatrical hamming’
physicality of the couple but if so, I can’t help reading a kind of ridicule of
all the very materialistic desires of modern ‘keeping-up-with the-Jones’
habits and sentimentalities.
“Like Hamilton’s exhibition strategy, the
image was complied from a tabulated list of image requirements…”
which served to outline and determine a basic foundation for Pop Art itself:
Popular, Transient, Expendable, Low Cost, Mass Produced, Young, Witty, Sexy,
Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big Business.
Hamilton worked alongside artist, John
McHale and architect John Voelcker.
“Their installation consisted of an a-symmetrical, dramatically angled
structure, the ‘Fun house’, covered with an over-sized image of Marilyn Monroe
which, along with a large scale replica bottle of Guinness, mimicked the
monumental scale of city hoarding and cinema advertising, although an aesthetic
tension was set up between these mass –culture images and the mass-consumption
poster of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers hung
on the wall as a work of Art”.
I have to say when I first returned to
England, aged 16 (having been born in the UK but emigrated to South Africa aged 6 weeks) I was struck by the visual bombardment of
advertising in London. It had a definite
impact on me and contributed to the sense of cultural shock I experienced for
some years. Although I returned in the 80s and not in the 50s, that
cultural trend probably began with such alacrity three decades earlier and Hamilton and his
collaborators’ commentary on it resonates profoundly with me.
I am also struck by the irony of the title,
which in retrospect becomes a joke – This
is in fact yesteryear but also a comment on the future impact of
materialism.
There was a jukebox playing music from the era which was incredibly evocative. I
do think that sound-scapes and music in a gallery is an immensely powerful means
of communicating and creating a mood. It
harks back to my experience in theatre and I’m tentatively and perhaps a little bashfully drawn to the idea of creating art that is almost a 'production' of sorts.
I know this is not right for all art and think often such a collage of
aural, visual, and spatial sensations is likely to be overwhelming and
undermining of the individual aspects in many cases – but for me I think it
might be something to think about as my appreciation of what is possible
grows.
The Critics Laugh, 1968 is not covered in the catalogue book a great deal which means I must
try to make sense of it alone. The work
encompasses several photographs, actual items, design drawings and and an
advertisement and it really struck a chord with me. Hamilton’s work is intrinsically tied up in
modern design and engineering. He seemed
obsessively interested in the detail of design and this preoccupation runs
throughout the exhibition. I suppose
what stood out for me with this work in particular is the humour and Surrealist
nature of it. The utterly ridiculous
fake set of false teeth (a memento his son bought back from a seaside holiday)
is attached to the handle of a Braun toothbrush. Hamilton always admired Braun and did a lot
of related work around the design of Braun items. To me Braun has always been around in the background
of existence I suppose but I’ve only ever seen it as a logo on functional and
quotidian objects in the home. Hamilton
sees the beauty of design but by attaching it to the teeth creates an hilarious
and bizarre object that has some sort of feedback loop on itself – a toothbrush
that shakes and rattles a set of false teeth.
There is something about the ridiculousness of human sexuality here
which made me laugh out loud when I watched the very funny advert, a spoof of
overtly sexualized advertising which has been so prominent in our media. I thought this was one of the highlights of
the whole exhibition but perhaps that is because I have an infantile sense of
humour. I do, however, like the Surrealism – sex, death, inner worlds colliding in fantasy and dreams with
outer worlds. And humour is immensely
powerful.
Treatment Rooms 1984
is another installation but one that is very different in tone and temperament
to the one discussed earlier. Although there is an innate criticism about
commercialism and materialism in This is
tomorrow, there is also a sense of optimism and hope. This is utterly gone by the time Hamilton
created Treatment Room for the Arts
Council Group exhibition titled Four Rooms
in 1984. There is an Orwellian sense of
despair and oppression in the austere, unhappy rooms. Hamilton “found the spirit of the 80s to be
one of contrasting ‘depression’, and determined his room would be ‘inspired by
the bleak, disinterested, seedily clinical style of the establishment
institution”.
In one of the rooms there is a hospital
bed/table and a less than comfortable looking blanket strewn upon it, just
underneath a TV monitor, which plays silent footage of one of Margaret Thatcher’s
Conservative Political party Broadcasts.
‘The installation dealt with the workings of power through surveillance (the
monitor reminding the viewer of CCTV cameras in Public spaces) and
indoctrination (the patient cured by the image of the leader”. What I am struck by is the foretelling and warning
about the growth of mass surveillance, and the critique of what that might do
to individuals in society, possibly robbing them of something precious and
fundamental to life. Whilst the
accompanying literature sardonically talks of indoctrination ‘healing’ the patient I of course read the image as one where the patient is in fact killed off – empty
hospitable beds with crumpled bedding seem symbolic of someone having been
removed. Nothingness where once there
was something.
I wonder what my father would have made of
this installation – an avid Thatcher supporter and defender.
Finally, I was struck by Lobby,
1988, another installation (seems I like such
things) which is a work inspired by a postcard Hamilton owned of the German
hotel lobby. It is a room: at the back
of the room covering the entire wall is a painting of the postcard, containing a
pillar, which is covered floor to ceiling in mirror. Then the lobby is recreated in actuality in
the room, a pillar covered from floor to ceiling in mirror. A set of stairs in the postcard is also there,
although in the real room you’re standing in, the stairs of course lead
nowhere. Dotted about the room are
smaller paintings of the lobby plus drawings.
The carpet in the painting is on the floor of the actual recreated
lobby.
Even though the sense created by Lobby is
one of loneliness, isolation, disorientation and detachment I found it a
magical work. You are able to step into
and walk around the artwork and it reminded me of Broadway Danny Rose, a Woody Allen film where
one of the characters steps out of the film – reality and fantasy merge. Here the same thing happens only the other
way round, and the fantasy is a pretty miserable one at that. The mirror maintains a sense of never-ending
blurring between the two dimensions and this blurring is something that
interests me a great deal. I was really
quite over-awed by this particular work.
I must end otherwise this may be the
longest Gallery Visit write up ever, but wanted to say there were so many works
which I have not had time to mention here which I found interesting and
compelling. I am not sure what my father
would have made of Hamilton’s view of the world – perhaps too left wing and
bleak for him, a bleak, despite his profession as a comic, but right wing individual. He would have certainly appreciated the
intellect, Hamilton’s immense knowledge and broad use of
media. While some of the work did not
immediately draw me in, there was much that did, and I have found his use of so many
different styles and media inspirational and fantastic to see.
I think there was so much unconscious ‘stuff’
about my decision to visit the Tate on the 21st, and I think it will
take me a while to think about and make sense of it. But I am very pleased I went because I sense I
am beginning to appreciate just how much of an impact art can have, and in a
way that I haven’t done before.
Hamilton’s relationship with Surrealism and
then pop art suggest to me that he was dealing with the tension between our inner
and outer worlds, connections, projections and the various levels of reality we
humans must contend with as we navigate through life both as individuals and in
terms of the state. I think I will be
considering some of what I picked up on during this visit for a good while to
come.
