Sunday, 12 May 2013
Thursday, 9 May 2013
Saturday, 6 April 2013
________________________Slogan________________________
Theatre, sexuality, sensuality and grab you by the balls images of Eddie Peake
There's a strange sense of theatricality when leaving through the Arrivals gate at an airport. Like an intermittent celebrity walled off from the masses all holding cards of names that mean nothing, eyes glaring at the endless catwalk stroll of passengers, suitcase in tow, variegated beauty from the tired and sweating to the immaculate statuesque. This five second parade is one of the few moments in which you have a certainty of being publicly scrutinised, visually decapitated then tossed aside once you've re-entered 'reality'. Theatre is constantly present; exchanges, actions, conversations all melt into an unscripted screenplay: "All the world's a stage and all the men and women are merely players" vacuous of their role, both bystander and actor in one.
Eddie Peake, in review of the above, has managed to proliferate the notion of theatricality across his output. Throughout his multilayered practice as painter, sculptor, performer, choreographer and curator he has managed to thread a line of identity as a joyful masquerade. Performances turn audience to voyeur, bodies (whether in real life or through photos) form sculptural and sexual objects. Paintings riff off the language of advertisement, text messaging, quick thrill cheap slogans to tempt you in then fling you swiftly out. The layers seems to incessantly pile up, miasmatic, a mental amalgamation which turns into and orgy of artistic references, painterly gesture and writhing sex laid bare or a plate, a sort of Goya for the modern world. "Things and thoughts advance or grow out from the middle....that's where everything unfolds" (Deleuze)
"You're not supposed to say this but I like everything I do" stated Peake in an interview with Frieze. The self-adoration of his work has probably more to do with the visual slices of popular culture he refurnishes than pure narcissism. Reproduction after all requires a love or lust for the object in question, an overriding desire for it to fit within your artistic means: artists "remix available forms and make use of data...signals already emitted" (Bourriaud, N.) with infinite potential to reuse for endless kicks. Peake's paintings have a undeniable visual grab. Acidic, fluorescent, neon-istic, his palette throws itself at you like a garish window display of flickering neon and highlighter coloured signs all announcing bargain basement prices. These are two dimensional Jason Rhodes, colour field painting remastered, text work given a throwaway advertisement style makeover. The fades and gradients of colour seem born from an Internet culture of endless web pages and tumblr blogs desperately attempting to suck you in with their sky blues and deep desert oranges. What they in fact represent is flat banality, surface appearing deep yet standing empty, sparse, void. Think clinical department stores, concept shopping, the framing of these essentially banal experiences which seduces, reels you in. Steinbach, in consideration of his 'display' pieces, notes an interesting point whereby he was struck "in the way that we ritualise our relationships with objects and wanted to look for the connections between the way that objects are exhibited at home, in stores and in museums" (Steinbach, H.). Peake seems to fuse these connections in what seems like a juggling act between modern life, painterly tradition and the intersection between the art gallery and shop floor (essentially one and the same thing in relation to the commercial gallery circuit). This idea has been a mainstay since Warhol took the idea up with Brillo Boxes. Everything is now potential, vapid commodities and vapid art reproducing the systems of a current cultural chaos.
Balanced between the surface and colour of Peake's paintings lies a variety of text slogans, remarks, off-hand, thrown at the viewer, piled atop each other, intersecting, confusing, shouting, playing and reflecting. The paintings act as speech bubbles for thoughts which, anchored in paint, are given a sense of permanence in an age of lightning speed data. Peake has confined these snap phrases into the barriers of paintings' history, and just like the airport arrivals, we gawp and stare, five seconds then move on. Created with jaunty masking tape, they become quick-fire phrases, easy to make, easy to consider. Void. Dead. Vapid and empty symbols of culture. They create no more sense than a lone text from a friend popping up in your iPhone in cutesy bubbles, yet by engaging "in a dialogue with the contemporary issues of our culture" (Maloney, M.) we become forced to 'read' these otherwise throwaway statements. In this sense painting achieves the high status of look and be enlightened/enriched yet at the same time it becomes "painting on the verge of being pathetic" (Tuymans. L).
This practice of interpreting cultural issues is further provoked in Peake's website. A fuchsia tinted image of a man grasping his cock with both hands stands alone, no link, portfolio nor biography. At once playful and implicitly sexual by referencing the seedy side of the Internet jutting you away, the implication that your desire to see more is in fact as equally seedy and snooping, artistic voyeurs turned to sexual voyeurs unexpectedly. "Online objects have a very interesting character- they are in parts both tangible and eternal, and exist in a medium which can be switched off, can freeze, black out or fuck up and the thing itself potentially be lost in cyber space." (http://cmdldn.tumblr.com/post/4367442244/justin-kemp)
The supposition about Peake's website (and in some senses with his paintings too) is that it represents a kind of " idea of America" which Warhol revels in, the notion that "the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest...A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke...All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good." Translate 'buy' for view and the contemporary form of Internet art becomes a democratic arena of thought and image. What exists is a removal of ownership, anytime access, it diffuses art from its preciosity or exchange value. In relation to his paintings the ease of creation has the potential to form democratic replication (the same way which DJs would produce records with extended breakbeats at the intro/outro to facilitate mixing, remixing or remastering). By this tone his "Giving Herself a Caesarian Section" series numb painting down to its bare bones. They represent a democratic theatricality (in the same sense that we can all act out a Shakespeare play). The painting has accessible potentiality within it, we're not observing Rembrandt mastery here but replicable simplicity.
Blended between the layers of sex, catchphrases and acid colour tones lies a deep rooted theatricality to his production. Peake sets up an amphitheatre for the intrigued. His 'sets' sit comfortably in the realm of theatre production, retail displays and artistic exhibits, all melding to present something which contains all the truth of a TV drama. Just as in the high end retail stores of Prada or McQueen we are presented with finesse, products just as equally as artworks; Steinbach notes of retail stores that "they would like us to believe that when we purchase one of their products we get to possess a work of art" (Steinbach, H.). No doubt we can reverse this idea upon Peake's work. The fake walls, mirrored structures, obscuring plants, weaving slopes all form different acts or scenes, spaces upon which to act but also vitrines or enclosures to encapsulate bodies. Boundaries are set, the performance exists here, when it slips beyond then it becomes something else, robbed of its intended meaning. " Not only objects but people are put on stage" (Steinbach, H.) be it through their presence within the space as viewer or performer.
The performances Peake creates within these spaces forms an obvious distinction between performer and audience whilst simultaneously moulding both onto a singular stage. The spaces create a flow of choreographed movement by all (Steinbach, H.), just as we visually and intuitively flow through a Louis Vuitton store, so to are we given seeming free reign yet inherent constriction within our movement of Peake's spaces. The spaces contain at once an "empty clinical voidness of disappointment linked to the retail as a form of consumption" (http://membership.contemporaryartsociety.org/news/hobsons-choice/hobsons-choice-eddie-peake-at-white-cube/ ) whilst maintaining the capacity for unstructured bodily flow, forming a modern day ampitheatre in an age where physical relations are diverted via digital connections.
The choreography of the space seems a slippery concern for Peake who favours intuitive performance just as much as regimentation. 'Anal House Meltdown', a club night hosted by Peake and his friends Prem Sahib and George Henry Longly, which plunders the depths of nightclub physicality and sensory perversion via their all dark dance floor, sexual posters darkly lit, plastered along walls, and an all over homoerotic atmosphere all to a soundtrack of heavy house. His naked football match at the Royal Academy interim show Premiums had the nonchalance of an anything can happen attitude reigned in under the foundations of footballs rules and regulations. Space then is akin to these footballing rules, it contains the arena of performance within certain boundaries yet allows the free flow of performative ideas. The most interesting point of these performances/gestures (and those which are photographed and pasted on walls) is the way they procure a sense of vicious sexuality, the way they employ you to observe, the sense in which these figures are at their least theatrical mortals, and at their pinnacle Greek sculptures breathed with life. As Rodger Cook notes, the viewer is allowed to "gracefully position their own desire"(Cook, R.). The work is phallocentric, phallogocularcentric, homoerotically charged yet with equal concerns of "the immediate connection between nudity and sin" (cite giorgio agamben) as with sex as objectification of the body. In his performance for Tate's Tanks writhing bodies (of various combinations) and statuesque poses melded. Desire, "aesthetically represented" (Cook, R.), is played out before the viewer. His performances expand like a physical amalgamation of his website, the black and white posters of naked bodies and his text pieces proclaiming "Hrrrd Dik in Batty", "Fluid on Face =)", "All up in Ribcage", "In Eye Balls and Mouth". There's a sense that the pinnacle of experience is presented by the human form itself. This is our desires played out, not caged on a screen or sunk in paint. We are sucked into an internal amphitheatre (Steinbach, H.), our minds freely ransacking indulgent optics. After all what's more seductive that the body itself, physical potential, sexual excitement, smooth sensuality. Peake's naked golden female figure in the Tate performance idolised and forced the viewer "to give in to vouyeuristic desire" (Tate) on such a level that it becomes unmissable, shimmering, gold as the embodiment of power, seduction, richness. Bodies become visual commodities to ransack.
During the 17th century Dutch painting took a turn away from mythological narrative and pat-on-the-back portraiture to focus on the Dutch interior. At first glance they contained nothing of great importance, visually receding minimalism. The worlds flickered between the banal to the slightly ordinary, taverns or music rooms, a girl writing a letter or learning the piano, MTV docu-dramas for a 17th century audience whom enjoyed a removed sense of voyeurism, curtain twitching had gone painterly. It seemed within these paintings that painting itself that became the end. On first sight they bore nothing of interest beyond exquisite painterly technique and the vague sense of "life". This has both a truthfulness and falsity. There was a facade of the nothing which veiled themes of love, sex and the virtues of domestic life (Vergara, A.). " From romantic scenes of lovers to scenes of brothels or of sexual love treated with a frankness that is also found in Dutch literature of the period." (Vergara, A.). This was Dutch TOWIE or Geordie Shore. Under the skin lay a mix of stories unwinding, bodies coalescing. Gesture is implication, gesture became suggestive. The depiction of wine became shorthand for alcoholic love affairs between two figures, sexuality was hinted with looks, touches and subtle visual hints. Frans van Mieris painting "Tavern Scene" has Peake written all over it (be it with figures drenched in wades of cloth). To the right of the foreground figure two dogs are avidly humping, from which we then move from to the doorway and see a couple most likely about to act out their desires. In the fore the seated man gestures for an alcoholic refill, all the while holding the woman's gaze seductively, his demise played out behind the woman with the image of a man slumped, drunk, future intoxication implicit. Paint sculpts these narrative, interiors forming their stomping ground, just as with Peake, the Dutch interiors had something of a choreographed instant. They form a whole series of playful and equally serious gestures, alcho-phallocentrism at play, wine as the elixir of sexual proliferation. Suggestion, not illustration. Secluded voyeurism akin to witnessing a couple, screened by curtains, making love.
The whole point here is that Peake is ploughing a field of 'gesture', from the ritualistic to the statuesque. Throughout his work gesture is implication, gesture is sexual, gesture becomes art-making, provocation, notation. From Vermeer to Pollock painting inherently contains gesture, movement. It is just as much concerned about the human bodies interaction with pigment as it is with a concern of the image. Sculpture denotes gesture as power, the physical act of carving marble, the bodies as force, but also the implications of gesture inherent within Greek statues or Medieval carvings, the notion that gesture is frozen, trapped (akin to the way Peake's performances tilt between "statuesque stillness and arrested movement" (Cook, R.). The notion of bodies and objects becomes easily interchangeable.
Glimpses of bodies in an age of image saturation are two a penny, we are incessantly forced views of bodies furnishing every part of our visual culture, from billboard advertisements, shop mannequins (and mannequin-esque models), online blogs, porn sites, magazines. Furthermore we live within the facade of gestural scrutiny, where celebrity is gazed upon by 'body analysts', where looks account for your personality as equally as what you say or do does, nightclubs are as much about music as they are concerned with bringing together a mass a sexual beings, writhing emotions, pumped- up energy. Throughout Peake's work we are presented with a culmination of observation on contemporary culture. We assume a sideline role in a game where gesture, sex, slogan-tastic riffs and acidic palletes lifted from advertising all clash, like regurgitated culture played out in art tropes. It's as if his intention is to fabricate some fables for the modern age, creating a theatricallity which melts between the shop floor, instant messaging, the Internet and the inherent power of the body as image. Allusions to contemporary youth culture raises the "consciousness of the anthropological and ontological condition of art in culture and society" (Steinbach, H.). What we end with is a presentation of spectacle, images played out as if Shakespearean, the barriers between life and art conjoined and indistinguishable. "The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is meditated by images" (Debord, G.)
There's a strange sense of theatricality when leaving through the Arrivals gate at an airport. Like an intermittent celebrity walled off from the masses all holding cards of names that mean nothing, eyes glaring at the endless catwalk stroll of passengers, suitcase in tow, variegated beauty from the tired and sweating to the immaculate statuesque. This five second parade is one of the few moments in which you have a certainty of being publicly scrutinised, visually decapitated then tossed aside once you've re-entered 'reality'. Theatre is constantly present; exchanges, actions, conversations all melt into an unscripted screenplay: "All the world's a stage and all the men and women are merely players" vacuous of their role, both bystander and actor in one.
Eddie Peake, in review of the above, has managed to proliferate the notion of theatricality across his output. Throughout his multilayered practice as painter, sculptor, performer, choreographer and curator he has managed to thread a line of identity as a joyful masquerade. Performances turn audience to voyeur, bodies (whether in real life or through photos) form sculptural and sexual objects. Paintings riff off the language of advertisement, text messaging, quick thrill cheap slogans to tempt you in then fling you swiftly out. The layers seems to incessantly pile up, miasmatic, a mental amalgamation which turns into and orgy of artistic references, painterly gesture and writhing sex laid bare or a plate, a sort of Goya for the modern world. "Things and thoughts advance or grow out from the middle....that's where everything unfolds" (Deleuze)
"You're not supposed to say this but I like everything I do" stated Peake in an interview with Frieze. The self-adoration of his work has probably more to do with the visual slices of popular culture he refurnishes than pure narcissism. Reproduction after all requires a love or lust for the object in question, an overriding desire for it to fit within your artistic means: artists "remix available forms and make use of data...signals already emitted" (Bourriaud, N.) with infinite potential to reuse for endless kicks. Peake's paintings have a undeniable visual grab. Acidic, fluorescent, neon-istic, his palette throws itself at you like a garish window display of flickering neon and highlighter coloured signs all announcing bargain basement prices. These are two dimensional Jason Rhodes, colour field painting remastered, text work given a throwaway advertisement style makeover. The fades and gradients of colour seem born from an Internet culture of endless web pages and tumblr blogs desperately attempting to suck you in with their sky blues and deep desert oranges. What they in fact represent is flat banality, surface appearing deep yet standing empty, sparse, void. Think clinical department stores, concept shopping, the framing of these essentially banal experiences which seduces, reels you in. Steinbach, in consideration of his 'display' pieces, notes an interesting point whereby he was struck "in the way that we ritualise our relationships with objects and wanted to look for the connections between the way that objects are exhibited at home, in stores and in museums" (Steinbach, H.). Peake seems to fuse these connections in what seems like a juggling act between modern life, painterly tradition and the intersection between the art gallery and shop floor (essentially one and the same thing in relation to the commercial gallery circuit). This idea has been a mainstay since Warhol took the idea up with Brillo Boxes. Everything is now potential, vapid commodities and vapid art reproducing the systems of a current cultural chaos.
Balanced between the surface and colour of Peake's paintings lies a variety of text slogans, remarks, off-hand, thrown at the viewer, piled atop each other, intersecting, confusing, shouting, playing and reflecting. The paintings act as speech bubbles for thoughts which, anchored in paint, are given a sense of permanence in an age of lightning speed data. Peake has confined these snap phrases into the barriers of paintings' history, and just like the airport arrivals, we gawp and stare, five seconds then move on. Created with jaunty masking tape, they become quick-fire phrases, easy to make, easy to consider. Void. Dead. Vapid and empty symbols of culture. They create no more sense than a lone text from a friend popping up in your iPhone in cutesy bubbles, yet by engaging "in a dialogue with the contemporary issues of our culture" (Maloney, M.) we become forced to 'read' these otherwise throwaway statements. In this sense painting achieves the high status of look and be enlightened/enriched yet at the same time it becomes "painting on the verge of being pathetic" (Tuymans. L).
This practice of interpreting cultural issues is further provoked in Peake's website. A fuchsia tinted image of a man grasping his cock with both hands stands alone, no link, portfolio nor biography. At once playful and implicitly sexual by referencing the seedy side of the Internet jutting you away, the implication that your desire to see more is in fact as equally seedy and snooping, artistic voyeurs turned to sexual voyeurs unexpectedly. "Online objects have a very interesting character- they are in parts both tangible and eternal, and exist in a medium which can be switched off, can freeze, black out or fuck up and the thing itself potentially be lost in cyber space." (http://cmdldn.tumblr.com/post/4367442244/justin-kemp)
The supposition about Peake's website (and in some senses with his paintings too) is that it represents a kind of " idea of America" which Warhol revels in, the notion that "the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest...A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke...All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good." Translate 'buy' for view and the contemporary form of Internet art becomes a democratic arena of thought and image. What exists is a removal of ownership, anytime access, it diffuses art from its preciosity or exchange value. In relation to his paintings the ease of creation has the potential to form democratic replication (the same way which DJs would produce records with extended breakbeats at the intro/outro to facilitate mixing, remixing or remastering). By this tone his "Giving Herself a Caesarian Section" series numb painting down to its bare bones. They represent a democratic theatricality (in the same sense that we can all act out a Shakespeare play). The painting has accessible potentiality within it, we're not observing Rembrandt mastery here but replicable simplicity.
Blended between the layers of sex, catchphrases and acid colour tones lies a deep rooted theatricality to his production. Peake sets up an amphitheatre for the intrigued. His 'sets' sit comfortably in the realm of theatre production, retail displays and artistic exhibits, all melding to present something which contains all the truth of a TV drama. Just as in the high end retail stores of Prada or McQueen we are presented with finesse, products just as equally as artworks; Steinbach notes of retail stores that "they would like us to believe that when we purchase one of their products we get to possess a work of art" (Steinbach, H.). No doubt we can reverse this idea upon Peake's work. The fake walls, mirrored structures, obscuring plants, weaving slopes all form different acts or scenes, spaces upon which to act but also vitrines or enclosures to encapsulate bodies. Boundaries are set, the performance exists here, when it slips beyond then it becomes something else, robbed of its intended meaning. " Not only objects but people are put on stage" (Steinbach, H.) be it through their presence within the space as viewer or performer.
The performances Peake creates within these spaces forms an obvious distinction between performer and audience whilst simultaneously moulding both onto a singular stage. The spaces create a flow of choreographed movement by all (Steinbach, H.), just as we visually and intuitively flow through a Louis Vuitton store, so to are we given seeming free reign yet inherent constriction within our movement of Peake's spaces. The spaces contain at once an "empty clinical voidness of disappointment linked to the retail as a form of consumption" (http://membership.contemporaryartsociety.org/news/hobsons-choice/hobsons-choice-eddie-peake-at-white-cube/ ) whilst maintaining the capacity for unstructured bodily flow, forming a modern day ampitheatre in an age where physical relations are diverted via digital connections.
The choreography of the space seems a slippery concern for Peake who favours intuitive performance just as much as regimentation. 'Anal House Meltdown', a club night hosted by Peake and his friends Prem Sahib and George Henry Longly, which plunders the depths of nightclub physicality and sensory perversion via their all dark dance floor, sexual posters darkly lit, plastered along walls, and an all over homoerotic atmosphere all to a soundtrack of heavy house. His naked football match at the Royal Academy interim show Premiums had the nonchalance of an anything can happen attitude reigned in under the foundations of footballs rules and regulations. Space then is akin to these footballing rules, it contains the arena of performance within certain boundaries yet allows the free flow of performative ideas. The most interesting point of these performances/gestures (and those which are photographed and pasted on walls) is the way they procure a sense of vicious sexuality, the way they employ you to observe, the sense in which these figures are at their least theatrical mortals, and at their pinnacle Greek sculptures breathed with life. As Rodger Cook notes, the viewer is allowed to "gracefully position their own desire"(Cook, R.). The work is phallocentric, phallogocularcentric, homoerotically charged yet with equal concerns of "the immediate connection between nudity and sin" (cite giorgio agamben) as with sex as objectification of the body. In his performance for Tate's Tanks writhing bodies (of various combinations) and statuesque poses melded. Desire, "aesthetically represented" (Cook, R.), is played out before the viewer. His performances expand like a physical amalgamation of his website, the black and white posters of naked bodies and his text pieces proclaiming "Hrrrd Dik in Batty", "Fluid on Face =)", "All up in Ribcage", "In Eye Balls and Mouth". There's a sense that the pinnacle of experience is presented by the human form itself. This is our desires played out, not caged on a screen or sunk in paint. We are sucked into an internal amphitheatre (Steinbach, H.), our minds freely ransacking indulgent optics. After all what's more seductive that the body itself, physical potential, sexual excitement, smooth sensuality. Peake's naked golden female figure in the Tate performance idolised and forced the viewer "to give in to vouyeuristic desire" (Tate) on such a level that it becomes unmissable, shimmering, gold as the embodiment of power, seduction, richness. Bodies become visual commodities to ransack.
During the 17th century Dutch painting took a turn away from mythological narrative and pat-on-the-back portraiture to focus on the Dutch interior. At first glance they contained nothing of great importance, visually receding minimalism. The worlds flickered between the banal to the slightly ordinary, taverns or music rooms, a girl writing a letter or learning the piano, MTV docu-dramas for a 17th century audience whom enjoyed a removed sense of voyeurism, curtain twitching had gone painterly. It seemed within these paintings that painting itself that became the end. On first sight they bore nothing of interest beyond exquisite painterly technique and the vague sense of "life". This has both a truthfulness and falsity. There was a facade of the nothing which veiled themes of love, sex and the virtues of domestic life (Vergara, A.). " From romantic scenes of lovers to scenes of brothels or of sexual love treated with a frankness that is also found in Dutch literature of the period." (Vergara, A.). This was Dutch TOWIE or Geordie Shore. Under the skin lay a mix of stories unwinding, bodies coalescing. Gesture is implication, gesture became suggestive. The depiction of wine became shorthand for alcoholic love affairs between two figures, sexuality was hinted with looks, touches and subtle visual hints. Frans van Mieris painting "Tavern Scene" has Peake written all over it (be it with figures drenched in wades of cloth). To the right of the foreground figure two dogs are avidly humping, from which we then move from to the doorway and see a couple most likely about to act out their desires. In the fore the seated man gestures for an alcoholic refill, all the while holding the woman's gaze seductively, his demise played out behind the woman with the image of a man slumped, drunk, future intoxication implicit. Paint sculpts these narrative, interiors forming their stomping ground, just as with Peake, the Dutch interiors had something of a choreographed instant. They form a whole series of playful and equally serious gestures, alcho-phallocentrism at play, wine as the elixir of sexual proliferation. Suggestion, not illustration. Secluded voyeurism akin to witnessing a couple, screened by curtains, making love.
The whole point here is that Peake is ploughing a field of 'gesture', from the ritualistic to the statuesque. Throughout his work gesture is implication, gesture is sexual, gesture becomes art-making, provocation, notation. From Vermeer to Pollock painting inherently contains gesture, movement. It is just as much concerned about the human bodies interaction with pigment as it is with a concern of the image. Sculpture denotes gesture as power, the physical act of carving marble, the bodies as force, but also the implications of gesture inherent within Greek statues or Medieval carvings, the notion that gesture is frozen, trapped (akin to the way Peake's performances tilt between "statuesque stillness and arrested movement" (Cook, R.). The notion of bodies and objects becomes easily interchangeable.
Glimpses of bodies in an age of image saturation are two a penny, we are incessantly forced views of bodies furnishing every part of our visual culture, from billboard advertisements, shop mannequins (and mannequin-esque models), online blogs, porn sites, magazines. Furthermore we live within the facade of gestural scrutiny, where celebrity is gazed upon by 'body analysts', where looks account for your personality as equally as what you say or do does, nightclubs are as much about music as they are concerned with bringing together a mass a sexual beings, writhing emotions, pumped- up energy. Throughout Peake's work we are presented with a culmination of observation on contemporary culture. We assume a sideline role in a game where gesture, sex, slogan-tastic riffs and acidic palletes lifted from advertising all clash, like regurgitated culture played out in art tropes. It's as if his intention is to fabricate some fables for the modern age, creating a theatricallity which melts between the shop floor, instant messaging, the Internet and the inherent power of the body as image. Allusions to contemporary youth culture raises the "consciousness of the anthropological and ontological condition of art in culture and society" (Steinbach, H.). What we end with is a presentation of spectacle, images played out as if Shakespearean, the barriers between life and art conjoined and indistinguishable. "The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is meditated by images" (Debord, G.)
Tuesday, 19 March 2013
_______Testarossa____________________|
Pastel shades and clear blue seas; Ferraris, Ray-Bans and New Wave wannabes.
A glimpse at how Miami Vice became a model of a visual culture and foretold a future of viral images and their potential for globalised impact.
"Lieutenant, I know that there are certain procedures that have to be followed, and what we're dealing with is an entrenched bureaucracy. But it has been one month, one month since the Daytona bit the dust. I'm trying to maintain a departmentally approved cover here and if I keep showing up for six figure drug deals looking like Little Abner it ain't gonna cut it."
"It's out in the back"
-Miami Vice Season III Episode 2
Cut scene to a low angle close-up shot panning slowly round a glistening white Ferrari Testarossa, the Miami sun only adding to a state of mesmerised desire. Between 1984-1989 Miami Vice managed to transcend its roots of crime drama and in turn became a template for a fast paced culture of image saturation and musical proliferation. The cocktail of pastel shades and palm trees had a visual appeal like no other, making an indelible mark on an MTV audience more concerned with image, emotion and energy than plot, characterisation or narratives. As VJ's spun the TV set alight with three minute clips of the freshest and now-est in music, youth culture and anyone else the least bit enticed pricked up their ears and became a target for a utopian free vision of consumer happiness where we as the audience became drenched in an obsession for replication. Image proliferation forced us all to peer into the mirror and see a void worth filling. At that time the limited field of 'image' was on the brink of exploding into the stratospheric. Teetering on the edge of cliff which was about to descend into the free market of Web 1.0, images see-sawed between print and televisuals; images with the capability of the stationary or high speed (tele-)visuals flatlining into your eyesight like a Lamborghini at 230 mph. What follows is an obsession for sequence. Repetition forming, carving, reigniting an internal visual folder. It only takes one image with enough memorability to become impaled into the mind.
When Miami Vice first aired in '84 the opening scene cut a vision of a high speed pastel tinted lifestyle, speedboats slicing water, white bikini tops ablaze in the bright white sun, guitar rock and pink flamingos all framed in a palm tree haze. The minute long intro sets a pace for the lifestyle about to be witnessed. Reflectivity is soaked into the sequence, water, glass buildings, sunglasses, it became a life reversed, mimicked and polished. Reflectivity undoubtedly contains notions of change, look and see anew, change then repeat ad infinitum. These shots aimed at the new youth generation took a slick polished look and processed it through their minds. Ideas of the cocaine lifestyle, speed junkies, where the sky was the limit and this new era of kids had all to play for. Particularly in the UK there was an emerging trend of thought where the party would never die. You only have to look at the Second Summer of Love of '89 with final term of Thatcher dying out, the hottest summer on record at the time, a surging rise of Acid House and a new found love of Ecstasy. The foundations were laid for a generation of an image saturated scene with a soundtrack to match. A vista of money created by Thatchers policies during the 80s created a panorama of individual prosperity, yet within this system lay the distinctly opposing end, a place where the poor were becoming worse off and in need of an ideaology, Acid house began to encapsulate a youth movement on a national scale, with images such as those from Miami Vice and the general widespread vibe of the prosperous halcyon youth only increasing this sense of the infinite party. What any movement requires is a new look, a new sound and a new drug. Acid House, Ecstasy and that Americana pastel look encapsulated the zeitgeist at the time ( Acid house was a derivative from the Chicago House scene, generally considered as the first house music productions by Chicago based artists throughout the 80s, which also notably became the place where MDMA was first detected in tablet form. As of '84 MDMA's street name "ecstasy" had been coined in California. Two notable points concerning Americas role within the UK scene of the 80s) . Vice laid the visual foundations and brought about a mindset which would continue way into the millennium.
Vice took many of its cues from the emerging fashion of 80's new wave, both in terms of its cinematography and musicality. Free associations can link a cut scene on South Beach to Talking Heads and Blondie, suave suits paired with the casual tee, Armani fashion at its freshest. Miami Vice's key aspect was its visual style, a language it could talk to you without distraction. Riffs that could be replayed under innumerable shades whilst still maintaining a feel of the fresh and devour-able. See devour-ability was central to the slick production. As seen with the likes of MTV and VH1, the process of information is made much easier if it can be devoured with minimal consideration. Director Michael Mann notably sustained the rule "no earth colours": if it could come in a fuchsia or pale orange then it should. Crew were told to repaint buildings acting as backdrops if they didn't contain that Miami Art Deco freshness.
The key element of the show came in the form of the Ferrari Testarossa; low smooth curves accentuating a polished white body. It formed a visual prop by which scenes were thrust out of the screen. Like the unforgettable lick of a classic rock riff, the Ferrari embodied an image of bright white speed, cocaine on wheels in a backdrop of Cosmopolitans and Martinis. This repeated totem acted to replenish memory, reinforcing a visual identity which in turn allowed for the reinforcement of style akin to company branding. After so many repeated encounters an image becomes viral, beyond the state of object and into the state of spectacle. "The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images".
May 21, 1989 and Vice airs its last ever episode, in that same year the Internet is bubbling up from its HTML and hypertext roots. Web 1.0 is the early sparks of a soon to be saturated visual world. Around this time Factory Record's band New Order release their album Technique, a miasma of Balearic and Acid House. Peter Saville continues to forward their visual ident and as the 90s begin to unfold the virility of images is more than ever prevalent. Just like Miami Vice, Factory Records and other such forces built on the framework of repetition and proliferation, be it pastel shades or Factory's unforgettable black and yellow stripes, now more than ever the way in which we saw images became just as much about a sense of reinforced memory as the power of the image presented. The mid-80s crowd preference for Ecstasy over alcohol merely highlights the move from the lethargy of experience to an instant hit. Distribution and redistribution became key, the image quickly became independent of any objective repackaging of its story. Come the millennium and narratives are now lost to stand alone images. Internet users have become editors and critics, remixers, remaster-ers and everything else in-between within a systematic frenzy of imagery and soundscape production/re-production.
Miami Vice became one of the first identities, not merely a crime drama in a slick, crisp setting. It transcended narrative in the same vein that images endlessly posted online seem void of narrative. Look was everything, cinematography that became impossible to it altered a course of style which is still present on the high streets and online department stores of today. The youth of 2002 unwittingly bought into its vibe under Rockstar Games GTA: Vice City with its neon Ocean Drive replica swarming with fast cars, hard drugs and harder prostitution. The whole 'crime' prototype simply allowed everything to feel dangerous, edgy and provocative. As if the look wasn't enough they had to throw in sex and drugs to lure you in. Systems of style and lifestyle were born. Commodification of both the image and object. Desires, wants, needs, obsessions. The power of image was starting to hit its stride.
As a decade pushed on the whole aura of imagery took a hard shift, freedom of choice was imposed on the consumer, the system of needs took its cues from the system of production, and a general sense of paranoia engulfed everyone with access to TV, Internet and any other visual data. Tony Blair's New Labour procured the help of bands such as Oasis with their symbolism of Britishness encapsulated in Noel Gallagher's Union Jack Epiphone, and as if not suffice enough with 'lad rock', their soundtrack was further expanded with The Farm's "All Together Now" and D:Reams " Things can only get better". Politics had now hit on the framework which Vice had first proliferated; a state whereby people could ignore the policies and endless narratives so long as everything looks and sounds like change. This high impact quick hit protocol spread like a virus becoming the norm. Culture, politics, television drip fed as you the viewer sat there unable to back away, unable to foster your own personal opinions, unable to look for more than five seconds at the same image without an impending sense of boredom creeping in by the fourth second. Imagery has become so effective that it can now exist solely by itself rather than between points of cultural reference. Narrative demise, image repetition, freedom of reproduction have forced a state of saturation. What first developed within the arena of crime drama has seemingly spread throughout our cultural landscape. This is not to say that Miami Vice was the sole evolutionary, but rather a strong model which no doubt helped to create a flourishing image heavy world. The greatest point of all this is that there is no point, there was never a need for this to happen, but a desire. That desirability to see something fresh, slick, bright, intense is a pointer to the fact of image as power. Be it through politics, MTV, the internet, advertisment, walks on the beach, postcards, museums. Images have infinite potential, Vice lay the concrete for an image based future. As Francis Bacon remarked: "I do believe modern man wants all the sensation of the image without the boredom of its' conveyance"
A glimpse at how Miami Vice became a model of a visual culture and foretold a future of viral images and their potential for globalised impact.
"Lieutenant, I know that there are certain procedures that have to be followed, and what we're dealing with is an entrenched bureaucracy. But it has been one month, one month since the Daytona bit the dust. I'm trying to maintain a departmentally approved cover here and if I keep showing up for six figure drug deals looking like Little Abner it ain't gonna cut it."
"It's out in the back"
-Miami Vice Season III Episode 2
Cut scene to a low angle close-up shot panning slowly round a glistening white Ferrari Testarossa, the Miami sun only adding to a state of mesmerised desire. Between 1984-1989 Miami Vice managed to transcend its roots of crime drama and in turn became a template for a fast paced culture of image saturation and musical proliferation. The cocktail of pastel shades and palm trees had a visual appeal like no other, making an indelible mark on an MTV audience more concerned with image, emotion and energy than plot, characterisation or narratives. As VJ's spun the TV set alight with three minute clips of the freshest and now-est in music, youth culture and anyone else the least bit enticed pricked up their ears and became a target for a utopian free vision of consumer happiness where we as the audience became drenched in an obsession for replication. Image proliferation forced us all to peer into the mirror and see a void worth filling. At that time the limited field of 'image' was on the brink of exploding into the stratospheric. Teetering on the edge of cliff which was about to descend into the free market of Web 1.0, images see-sawed between print and televisuals; images with the capability of the stationary or high speed (tele-)visuals flatlining into your eyesight like a Lamborghini at 230 mph. What follows is an obsession for sequence. Repetition forming, carving, reigniting an internal visual folder. It only takes one image with enough memorability to become impaled into the mind.
When Miami Vice first aired in '84 the opening scene cut a vision of a high speed pastel tinted lifestyle, speedboats slicing water, white bikini tops ablaze in the bright white sun, guitar rock and pink flamingos all framed in a palm tree haze. The minute long intro sets a pace for the lifestyle about to be witnessed. Reflectivity is soaked into the sequence, water, glass buildings, sunglasses, it became a life reversed, mimicked and polished. Reflectivity undoubtedly contains notions of change, look and see anew, change then repeat ad infinitum. These shots aimed at the new youth generation took a slick polished look and processed it through their minds. Ideas of the cocaine lifestyle, speed junkies, where the sky was the limit and this new era of kids had all to play for. Particularly in the UK there was an emerging trend of thought where the party would never die. You only have to look at the Second Summer of Love of '89 with final term of Thatcher dying out, the hottest summer on record at the time, a surging rise of Acid House and a new found love of Ecstasy. The foundations were laid for a generation of an image saturated scene with a soundtrack to match. A vista of money created by Thatchers policies during the 80s created a panorama of individual prosperity, yet within this system lay the distinctly opposing end, a place where the poor were becoming worse off and in need of an ideaology, Acid house began to encapsulate a youth movement on a national scale, with images such as those from Miami Vice and the general widespread vibe of the prosperous halcyon youth only increasing this sense of the infinite party. What any movement requires is a new look, a new sound and a new drug. Acid House, Ecstasy and that Americana pastel look encapsulated the zeitgeist at the time ( Acid house was a derivative from the Chicago House scene, generally considered as the first house music productions by Chicago based artists throughout the 80s, which also notably became the place where MDMA was first detected in tablet form. As of '84 MDMA's street name "ecstasy" had been coined in California. Two notable points concerning Americas role within the UK scene of the 80s) . Vice laid the visual foundations and brought about a mindset which would continue way into the millennium.
Vice took many of its cues from the emerging fashion of 80's new wave, both in terms of its cinematography and musicality. Free associations can link a cut scene on South Beach to Talking Heads and Blondie, suave suits paired with the casual tee, Armani fashion at its freshest. Miami Vice's key aspect was its visual style, a language it could talk to you without distraction. Riffs that could be replayed under innumerable shades whilst still maintaining a feel of the fresh and devour-able. See devour-ability was central to the slick production. As seen with the likes of MTV and VH1, the process of information is made much easier if it can be devoured with minimal consideration. Director Michael Mann notably sustained the rule "no earth colours": if it could come in a fuchsia or pale orange then it should. Crew were told to repaint buildings acting as backdrops if they didn't contain that Miami Art Deco freshness.
The key element of the show came in the form of the Ferrari Testarossa; low smooth curves accentuating a polished white body. It formed a visual prop by which scenes were thrust out of the screen. Like the unforgettable lick of a classic rock riff, the Ferrari embodied an image of bright white speed, cocaine on wheels in a backdrop of Cosmopolitans and Martinis. This repeated totem acted to replenish memory, reinforcing a visual identity which in turn allowed for the reinforcement of style akin to company branding. After so many repeated encounters an image becomes viral, beyond the state of object and into the state of spectacle. "The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images".
May 21, 1989 and Vice airs its last ever episode, in that same year the Internet is bubbling up from its HTML and hypertext roots. Web 1.0 is the early sparks of a soon to be saturated visual world. Around this time Factory Record's band New Order release their album Technique, a miasma of Balearic and Acid House. Peter Saville continues to forward their visual ident and as the 90s begin to unfold the virility of images is more than ever prevalent. Just like Miami Vice, Factory Records and other such forces built on the framework of repetition and proliferation, be it pastel shades or Factory's unforgettable black and yellow stripes, now more than ever the way in which we saw images became just as much about a sense of reinforced memory as the power of the image presented. The mid-80s crowd preference for Ecstasy over alcohol merely highlights the move from the lethargy of experience to an instant hit. Distribution and redistribution became key, the image quickly became independent of any objective repackaging of its story. Come the millennium and narratives are now lost to stand alone images. Internet users have become editors and critics, remixers, remaster-ers and everything else in-between within a systematic frenzy of imagery and soundscape production/re-production.
Miami Vice became one of the first identities, not merely a crime drama in a slick, crisp setting. It transcended narrative in the same vein that images endlessly posted online seem void of narrative. Look was everything, cinematography that became impossible to it altered a course of style which is still present on the high streets and online department stores of today. The youth of 2002 unwittingly bought into its vibe under Rockstar Games GTA: Vice City with its neon Ocean Drive replica swarming with fast cars, hard drugs and harder prostitution. The whole 'crime' prototype simply allowed everything to feel dangerous, edgy and provocative. As if the look wasn't enough they had to throw in sex and drugs to lure you in. Systems of style and lifestyle were born. Commodification of both the image and object. Desires, wants, needs, obsessions. The power of image was starting to hit its stride.
As a decade pushed on the whole aura of imagery took a hard shift, freedom of choice was imposed on the consumer, the system of needs took its cues from the system of production, and a general sense of paranoia engulfed everyone with access to TV, Internet and any other visual data. Tony Blair's New Labour procured the help of bands such as Oasis with their symbolism of Britishness encapsulated in Noel Gallagher's Union Jack Epiphone, and as if not suffice enough with 'lad rock', their soundtrack was further expanded with The Farm's "All Together Now" and D:Reams " Things can only get better". Politics had now hit on the framework which Vice had first proliferated; a state whereby people could ignore the policies and endless narratives so long as everything looks and sounds like change. This high impact quick hit protocol spread like a virus becoming the norm. Culture, politics, television drip fed as you the viewer sat there unable to back away, unable to foster your own personal opinions, unable to look for more than five seconds at the same image without an impending sense of boredom creeping in by the fourth second. Imagery has become so effective that it can now exist solely by itself rather than between points of cultural reference. Narrative demise, image repetition, freedom of reproduction have forced a state of saturation. What first developed within the arena of crime drama has seemingly spread throughout our cultural landscape. This is not to say that Miami Vice was the sole evolutionary, but rather a strong model which no doubt helped to create a flourishing image heavy world. The greatest point of all this is that there is no point, there was never a need for this to happen, but a desire. That desirability to see something fresh, slick, bright, intense is a pointer to the fact of image as power. Be it through politics, MTV, the internet, advertisment, walks on the beach, postcards, museums. Images have infinite potential, Vice lay the concrete for an image based future. As Francis Bacon remarked: "I do believe modern man wants all the sensation of the image without the boredom of its' conveyance"
Saturday, 9 March 2013
Monday, 4 March 2013
Sunday, 24 February 2013
|_Refresh_|
It's not that the world needs to exist in a two tone kind of vision, it's that it does and the consequences of that need to be addressed in any practice, be it visual or musical. With the inevitability of any practice ending up online in some way is it necessary to force an idea to conform to a virtual structure. A framing within a 'space' in the same vein that renaissance art accepted a different type of framing, a physical sort, either in the literal sense of a frame, or within the proximity of a certain type of space (church/cathedral/palace). Can we differentiate between the tabs and windows on screen to the IRL framing of a Goya? The mass bemoan at a type of 'proper' experience of an artwork, the aura feels more valid in person, there's an inbuilt detachment to the way digital can work. Detachment however can hold just as much power, with an ever flittering mind surfing the waves of pages this detachment forces a kind of instant grab visual feel, the intro has 5 seconds to grab you before you hit skip.
In basic terms the Internet is a leveller of hierarchy, and within that idea art has now been destabilised, google art projects to tumblr, twitter and much more. These are all pretty basic concerns, the point floats around the way in which we now consider the observation of an art 'object' - the term object here contains within it notions of how computers formed objects within themselves in order to replicate real life, files, folders, desktop, windows; all physical and non physical objects, all equally positioned within society. Online represents a civilisation of the mind. Online contains issues of materiality, problems to be harnessed and thrown back, a post-medium condition in which the artwork now has the capacity to be of equal importance virtually or IRL, a potential where art can double just by being considered a thing in whichever space it cares to exist. The point is a freedom of access to anything and a freer acceptance of anything goes art. Networks of visuals flourish over singular paths, hyperlinks become slides between various pools. When the probability of experiencing is most likely to first lie within a virtual realm it seems impossible to deny the power shift.
The Internet has already proven its worth in destroying pre existing business models, Napster inverted music consumption, Google books and Kindle contain the potential to destroy physical publishing. The Internet provides a liberation which can be harnessed or cut off, a decentralisation of art which can take practices above and beyond gallery systems; a place whereby user generated content becomes user generated exhibitionism without boundaries of physical space. Curation then begins to act in a new realm, one in which this virtual space can become formed to suit relational goals or strange juxtapositions, the serendipity of the Internet becomes a structure to endlessly link practices. What's more, the Internet naturally contains an instantaneity and presentness impossible to replicate IRL. The exciting potential exemplifies the fact that anything online has the instant potential to be remixed, remastered and republished. Culture repurposing itself to form an ever changing freshness until its maximum potential has been dragged from it, a point at which remixes move from models of to models because (appropriation to influence/sample back to original). Practices can evolve to develop objects which can then move to the digital, and within rendering and reconstituting the origins become more harder to define or understand. Feedback loops create a wealth of concerns around art making, digital becomes a debate-sparking culture. Online objects become grounds for development, not stability and the stationary. The capacity for a loss of control over production can be as equally important for the transgression of the object as the initial construction of the art. Scale can be removed, texture dissolved and the constitution of space and its proximity to other objects is lost in images reels, photo albums and endless scrolling. The horizon of a gallery space moves into a vertical waterfall of white noise, at times feeling infinite in its descent.
"online objects have a very interesting character- they are in parts both tangible and eternal, and exist in a medium which can be switched off, can freeze, black out or fuck up and the thing itself potentially be lost in cyber space." http://cmdldn.tumblr.com/post/4367442244/justin-kemp
The internet has formed a position where our interior thoughts can act as online commodities. Lost in the spectacle of infinite information reeling through infinite pages. Dredged emotion becomes entertainment, screen transforms to canvas, all swirling under a haze of emotionless comments and snap-decisions to hit enter. A hurricane of thought which whips up new ground for conversation every day, turfed up visuals thrown into someone else's backyard.
In basic terms the Internet is a leveller of hierarchy, and within that idea art has now been destabilised, google art projects to tumblr, twitter and much more. These are all pretty basic concerns, the point floats around the way in which we now consider the observation of an art 'object' - the term object here contains within it notions of how computers formed objects within themselves in order to replicate real life, files, folders, desktop, windows; all physical and non physical objects, all equally positioned within society. Online represents a civilisation of the mind. Online contains issues of materiality, problems to be harnessed and thrown back, a post-medium condition in which the artwork now has the capacity to be of equal importance virtually or IRL, a potential where art can double just by being considered a thing in whichever space it cares to exist. The point is a freedom of access to anything and a freer acceptance of anything goes art. Networks of visuals flourish over singular paths, hyperlinks become slides between various pools. When the probability of experiencing is most likely to first lie within a virtual realm it seems impossible to deny the power shift.
The Internet has already proven its worth in destroying pre existing business models, Napster inverted music consumption, Google books and Kindle contain the potential to destroy physical publishing. The Internet provides a liberation which can be harnessed or cut off, a decentralisation of art which can take practices above and beyond gallery systems; a place whereby user generated content becomes user generated exhibitionism without boundaries of physical space. Curation then begins to act in a new realm, one in which this virtual space can become formed to suit relational goals or strange juxtapositions, the serendipity of the Internet becomes a structure to endlessly link practices. What's more, the Internet naturally contains an instantaneity and presentness impossible to replicate IRL. The exciting potential exemplifies the fact that anything online has the instant potential to be remixed, remastered and republished. Culture repurposing itself to form an ever changing freshness until its maximum potential has been dragged from it, a point at which remixes move from models of to models because (appropriation to influence/sample back to original). Practices can evolve to develop objects which can then move to the digital, and within rendering and reconstituting the origins become more harder to define or understand. Feedback loops create a wealth of concerns around art making, digital becomes a debate-sparking culture. Online objects become grounds for development, not stability and the stationary. The capacity for a loss of control over production can be as equally important for the transgression of the object as the initial construction of the art. Scale can be removed, texture dissolved and the constitution of space and its proximity to other objects is lost in images reels, photo albums and endless scrolling. The horizon of a gallery space moves into a vertical waterfall of white noise, at times feeling infinite in its descent.
"online objects have a very interesting character- they are in parts both tangible and eternal, and exist in a medium which can be switched off, can freeze, black out or fuck up and the thing itself potentially be lost in cyber space." http://cmdldn.tumblr.com/post/4367442244/justin-kemp
The internet has formed a position where our interior thoughts can act as online commodities. Lost in the spectacle of infinite information reeling through infinite pages. Dredged emotion becomes entertainment, screen transforms to canvas, all swirling under a haze of emotionless comments and snap-decisions to hit enter. A hurricane of thought which whips up new ground for conversation every day, turfed up visuals thrown into someone else's backyard.
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