IN DISCUSSION
IN DISCUSSION is a series of monthly informal discussions on Zoom where I invite artists from all over the world to meet online regularly and gain free professional development by presenting their work to other artists and gaining constructive feedback from the audience. This experience has allowed me to bring together artists from all corners of the globe online (recent discussion have included artists taking part from the USA, Ireland, Austria and the UK) to meet in an informal and friendly yet critical way to discuss their work and make connections in ways that would be impossible in the real physical world. It has taught me first-hand some of the complexities of online working but has allowed me to reflect upon those issues where I have also been able to implement changes in my teaching practice.
IN DISCUSSION begun in the 2000s where events would take place in physical spaces (not online) and initially finished in 2010. It was then rejuvenated online in November 2020 and has been taking place monthly since then on Zoom.The latest was the April discussion including work shown by Henrietta Simson and Sarah Whiteley.
Selected previous publications by Lee Campbell
written in response to past IN DISCUSSIONS
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Lee Campbell
Beautiful Triggers
In Discussion: Elly Clarke's Time and Place at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Woolwich, London
June 2009
Enter the hospital and turn left in the direction of Pathology. Avoid collision with the patient trolleys and doctors and nurses busy on life-saving missions. Past the restaurant and through the swing doors and up the ramped floor noticing the Mark Rothko imitations hung in anti-grace, you are indeed on a stairway to heaven, final stop the mortuary. Yet between life and death, there is contemplation. Gaston Bachelard's seminal work, Poetics of Space (1958) speaks of how our surroundings affect our perceptions and experiences. Seeking to connect people with the latent spirituality of an environment, highlighting certain behavioural idiosyncrasies and addressing the poetics of a space can challenge any artist. Functioning as both art showcase and last stop before the mortuary, Elly's self portraits capturing man's compulsive restlessness for new experiences by juxtaposing a multitude of random locations, are exactly what the doctor ordered. How many of us have taken delight in spreading a box of old photographs across the floor to recollect places and people loved and lost? Order is given to the eclectic collage by Elly's visual arrest in terms of judging complimentary or contradicting line, form, shape and colour relationships between two images yet retaining a child's play. Seeing our memories through a child's eyes can bring sheer delight. A child with a camera will snap and snap as long as he can. How can we know what is truly worth remembering? Her sometimes banal subject matter of incidentals and indistinguishables may trigger a memory for the artist and audience alike. Images both empty and full, nod to painterly formalism thus elevating the soon obsolete 6x4 format used here from being just a series of holiday snaps. This very private recollection of an artist's journey, allows the audience to recognise a number of settings and scenarios without ever having been there. We are then given further clues to their exact identity by name tags of places and dates, yet the poetics in the work come from not knowing where many of the works were composed. Social networking sites such as Blogger and Facebook allow access to our personal journeys at speed for all the world to see. We upload instantly and share with our friends. We have erased the wait for what could be a disappointing coloured print as in ‘olden days’. For the amateur, rolls and rolls of film would be developed post summer holiday expedition to find a few photographic ‘hits’.Yet lets celebrate the ‘misses’. In our digital revolution, many images are taken and then simply deleted. How can we say in years to come what it was that actually helped us to remember an experience?
Visual language impacts all avenues of our lives, in our domestic home lives and institutional environments we may be familiar with and those not so on a daily basis. We only need cite architect David Adjaye's coloured windows on Tower Hamlets’ Idea Store library spaces referencing 1930's modernism of simple colour acting as a reflective and harmonising experience. Adjaye transformed a pre-supposed mundane setting into something vibrant, funky and a benefit to the whole community. At the start of the year I met Victoria Hume, Arts Manager for Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Trust who has for a number of years successfully integrated art works into the hospital environment with various site-specific art works and events providing a contemplative pause in for what can be a period of distress for both patients and their families alike. Removing the idea of hospital art as being mere universal social decoration, Hume elevates morale with her thought-provoking and challenging interventions which have blossomed into a number of off-site projects. Elly's work indeed extends this, providing poetic triggers to an otherwise impersonal and here somewhat eerie environment.
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Lee Campbell
The Beauty and the Beast
In Discussion: Corinne Felgate:Just Act Natural at Flat 123, Balfron Tower, St Leonards Street, E14 0QT London until May 10th 2009
It’s a sunny Saturday afternoon and I am visiting Corinne Felgate’s latest exhibition. 21 floors up, along the walkway and we reach Flat 123 neighboured by the usual bland domestic interiors of such housing interspersed with colour from a nearby trellis work with artificial faded flowers which appears to have just been ironed.
We reach grey metal door and enchantingly enter the space down the stairs hit by the pungent smell of “Home Sweet Home”, with the same overbearing gut-wrench as greasy donut fat along Southend promenade. I am speaking of the pivotal work here, a kitchen floor covered with melted red strawberry jelly whose gloopiness and translucent beauty heightens its bloodied connotations. We are treated to a further three spaces of domestic un-bliss. Get your head out the kitchen fire and turn around and enter the orange room. “Better Luck Next Time” consists of a goldfish in a plastic container, swimming aimlessly, hung on a rope pulley. The next time I visit the exhibition to conduct a discussion of the works, Mr Goldfish (known as Ernie in homage to Mr Goldfinger) will be more than just a whiter shade of pale. Death surely becomes him. Mrs Beaton would surely have something to say about the adjoing room – a wash basin erupting foam, “Dull as Dishwater”. The living room features furniture from Erno’s original habitual abode, Seventies swivel plastic chairs competing with floral cushion and equally flower power wallpaper, just a one strip echo left in a room of monochromatic Playschool shades. Lest we forget the balcony and who could with the pull of a view which encapsulates the whole of London central and periphery. The final piece is “AirMail”, dozens of paper aeroplanes catapulted off the edge, birds of prey with the same abysmal fate as the Wily Coyote falling off the side of a rockied mount with the infamous puff of smoke. Their free flight of fancy coming to land on who knows what part of the surrounding troubadours of day-tripping yet with a one-way ticket to ride.
Gaston Bachelard's seminal work, "Poetics of Space" (1958) speaks of how our surroundings affect our perceptions and experiences. Seeking to connect people with the latent spirituality of an environment, highlighting certain behavioural idiosyncrasies and addressing the poetics of a space can be challenging at the best of times for any artist. Corinne Felgate's interaction with Erno Goldfinger's most iconic Balfron Tower compels the viewer in the first instance by presenting them with an environment so brutal and unrelenting, and in the second, the placing of objects in which to subvert the supposed domestic confort of an apartment lat. She thus creates a heightened spirituality, in agreement with Peggy Phelan's opening address to Tate Modern’s Live Culture conference in 2003, that (performance art) “has developed from three points: theatre, painting and a return to shamanism.” Corinne's performative sculptural installations both compel and repel. On one level there is a childish sweetness, the saccharine smell of the strawberry jelly, the new-best friend as the goldfish in the bag and the playfulness of a paper aeroplane, and on the other, metaphonrs of blood (jelly), claustrophobia and alienation (goldfish) and vertigo (paper aeroplanes). The flat acts as the perfect catalyst for Corinne to load the environment with signifiers of psychological unease aplenty with much of the art acting as suggestions of the act of similarly pre-meditated and spontaneous death with the viewer taking on a similar role as the Gene Hackman detective in the Francis Ford Coppola film “The Conversation” (1974). Corrine's installation perfectly extends theorist Slavoj Zizek's descripition of the apartment as being “one of those hellish places which abound in David Lynch's films, places where all moral and social inhibitions seem to be suspended, where everything is possible. The lowest masochistic sex, obscenities, the deepest level of our desires tt we are not even ready to admit to ourselves, we are confronted with them in such places”.
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Lee Campbell
All things bright and painterly - Dec 2009
Lee Campbell highlights his recent IN DISCUSSION series and the work of four UK painters Anja Priska, Mike Ryder, Alastair Eales and Sarah Kate Wilson.
START.
Mother was convinced for 30 years that Joni Mitchell’s hit "Yellow Taxi" went
"They made paradise and went to Juniper Park"
when in reality she sings;
"They paved paradise and put up a parking lot"
For Juniper Park exists everywhere that we can’t reach. Climb aboard and watch it pass you by. Wave everyone now and then to what catches your eye…....................
SEE ME.
BEGINNER LEVEL SHOULD:
Learn how to write and spell me.
Learn the grammar of me.
INTERMEDIATE LEVEL SHOULD:
Convey me correctly or if you forget, try with conviction.
ADVANCED LEVEL SHOULD:
Know how to elocute me with vim and vigour.
Equip yourself de rigueur.
Know when to use me and if you are being used by me. of me.
Know how to speak me and be spoken at by The Audience using me.
Have lessons on perfectly joining me up
Use me and know if you are being used by me.
I (me) – SEE ME (The Word)
They – THE AUDIENCE (Consumers)
I am SEE ME. I am to be seen and to be heard and to be written.
I am the headline and the sideline.
I am the sub-text, the pre-text and the context.
I am the suffix, the prefix and the crucifix.
I am the verb, the adverb, the advent, the address. The advert of a dress.
I am the preposition in an improper proposition.
The function, the female function and the malfunction.
Catchphrase Paraphrase.
Catch a parachute failing.
First words Last Words.
Love Mail Hate Mail.
Life Threat Death Threat.
What is uttered as The Audience draws its last breath.
Football anthems in the terraces as ten metre neon sky high.
Yes or No? Love me or Leave me?
The hook between the Verse and the Chorus.
Fill in The Gaps.
Mind The Gaps.
Sit my learners on buses, trains and planes and watch me pass by from every angle. Stain me on the side of walls. Icky-sticky print me on windows and casually throw me together in a scrumply crunchied up action after being munchied with the stench of cod and chip fat to being feasted on by pigeons around litter bins in ickly-sickly absolute.
Vive La Machine! Hear every single letter take shape with a banging clunk of every second on a British Rail station clock as you type me using a typewriter. Every single second and every letter that you press acknowledged. Your own personalised stamp of authority like the heavy blow of the post office stamp validating your parcels.
That authoritative clunk!
"A clatter machine,
What a magical sound, And full of noises, That spins us around"
*taken from the song Cvalda by Bjork (2000)
Quote and misquote. Learn your lines and forget your lines.
The audience never noticed and applauded the scriptwriter.
Na na na na na La la la la la
Da da da da da Tra la la la la can give your listener just as many ingredients to cook their own beautiful creation in their minds as any a curious lyric.
Spend days scripting messages to your beautiful love only to speak of tonight’s curry, last night’s mistake and tomorrow’s weather. How absurd to predict. Anything else just falls short.
Watch me hover in the sky reflected off bus windows thanks to Mother Nature. Maybe The Audience will numb themselves against my one by one telling them how to think, what to do and put their good faith in next.
Blur me to illegibility as the bus picks up top speed. In my abstracted form, I appear like prizes on the conveyor belt of The Generation Game, now just colourful shapes, blobs and blips cruising past my audience with exceptions to catch their attention.
All this See Me, all this Juniper Park.
Let The Audience float in and out of me and my curious idiosyncrasies like an invisible modernist plane. Like a cloud dipping in and out of the sun.
Let me be flaneur and observe like a restless James Stewart in
Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window.
The Audience live in a constant whirlwind of a billion See Me’s streaming through their psyche. See Me accepts that he rarely leaches onto their memory unless I hit on their personal ideals of what is deemed suitable levels of taste, interest, desire, avoidance, horror, fantasy, comedy, love and death. For all of See Me’s good intentions to reach out and touch The Audience, he falls prey to advertising giants who socially condition The Audience, informing them what is good and bad taste and what to avoid as it is not "right". Any See Me message can be discarded if it poses a threat to The Audience’s beliefs or to their very existence. Rarely do The Audience enter into choices of accepting a See Me variant for purely functional purposes.Previous concerns are contradicted by new peculiar messages that catch our interest. The message offers us a shinier or quirkier alternative, to lift us out of the humdrum and banality of modern existence, like pop music transporting bored teenagers out of the misery and depravity of cold wet drizzly Britain as quoted by music producer Pete Waterman. We can fantasise like a down at heart Shirley Valentine of escaping a life of domestic gloom where our only outlet is talking to the kitchen wall. Yet running away to the sunshine (leaving behind other half Joe to fend for himself for a fortnight in Greece as in Shirley’s case),can soon confuse us or pose a threat to our existence and may make us feel uncomfortable as they disorientate our accepted "norms", norms which can be hard to shrug off and in fact are the very thing that make us content even if they do appear slightly stalemate at times. Still The Audience can actually feel strongly attracted to this disorientation even though this may make them feel outcast. Having an awareness that their choices are never personal and always dictated due to social conditioning, The Audience may enter into a deliberate misreading of a See Me message in order to find what they believe to be their own personal code that no one else could possibly think of which therefore makes them feel special. Thus this Juniper Park society of almost deliberate misinterpretation thrives.
In 2007, Susie Wild wrote in the Metro newspaper of my supermarket sticker installation “Juniper Park” at Chapter gallery in Cardiff "Together, they (the stickers) make up a bubblegum fairytale land not dissimilar to Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory with a surface saccharine innocence that hints at darker undertones... seemingly beautiful where all is not as it appears". The piece was inspired by my love of German Romanticist landscape paintings. The collage effect was directly inspired by my love of putting forms together in a “painterly” way ever since I had started a scrapbook of images ten years prior. Between 1993 and 1998, I kept a mammoth book of images from magazines, newspapers, in fact any printed matter I could get my hands on from all over the world. Blur’s latest CD release glued next to an ad for a German car between Birds of a Feather over a plea for the abolition of slavery besides Madonna’s latest reinvention. There was a never a hierarchy of images but I went with my gut instinct in the pages’ composition. I glued the images together as if I was making a painting. I was fascinated with the image. The image of others and how we present ourselves to others. We live in a society of consumption where consumerism acts as a religion for many to feel value and worth through the products they buy and the lifestyle they choose to surround themselves with.
This year I have seen paintings, read about paintings, discussed about paintings and got into heated debates about paintings without actually making a painting. Yet in my own practice I consider myself a "painter" as I take on painterly concerns in terms of composition and historical reference even though for the past five years I have been making installations and sculptural work and most recently performance. It is this notion of being "painterly" that fascinates me and is present within the work of many artists I have chosen to engage with this year in a series of discussions about fine art.
Anja Priska creates her own Juniper Park, a personal dystopia/utopia where mashed up-imagery co-exist together in an almost frenetic teenage visual diary. Her highly symbolic paintings both repulse and attract, acting as testaments of a society obsessed with the consumption of imagery in what can only be described as a contemporary update on the whole genre of still life painting but done through the eyes of a You-Tube, image greedy public where images are immediately shared with the world via various social networking sites such Flicker and Facebook.
"I paint things which are seductive, funny and sweet but are also things I am afraid of" explains Anja. Her colourful paintings act as self portraits of Anja's own compelling to consume such sugar-coatedness. Anja paints in her studio, lives in her studio and sleeps in her studio surrounded by paintings. The artist says she doesn’t want a decoding within her work though I would like to find anyone who doesn't immediately start thinking of the metaphorical connotations of bananas, monkeys, cockerels and Animal from “The Muppets". Despite what the images may or may not represent, the seductive highly stylised graphic way in which Anja painted earlier works is met with a fresher and looser way of applying paint in those more recent.
These earlier works have the frozen flatness of a movie screen with bizarre depths of fields, weird angles not dissimilar to a surrealist college or a Monty Python animation and the same illustrative quality to that of Post-Reformation stained glass windows where details are reduced to the bare minimum to act as suggestions to the details. In more recent works Anja has lost the collaging effect in favour of the depiction of one or two central figures. Hanging in her studio during IN DISCUSSION 5 are all the paintings together, working like an installation. Painter Gemma Nelson's comment about how at night paintings have sex with each other and make a big mess, perfectly sums up the energy that her set has en masse. Above her bed are portraits of monkeys, possibly mocking humans as the real ones who are the stupid and passive consumers. The looseness of these brush marks are done with a playfulness and sense of enjoyment with a palette of similar hues and tones of the same morbidity and darkness as Karen Carpenter singing "Rainy Days and Mondays" or the sugary sweet but woeful “Close to You” or “Sing”. Paired down images these may be, they have a heightened melancholy, sadness and pessimism. I immediately think of my favourite music video. Anja's illustrations have the same feeling of gloom as in the cartoon sequence in Pink Floyd's “Another Brick In The Wall”. Throughout the discussion, Anja expressed her trauma in gaining the perfection that she desires. "Oh God we're all doomed!" Kate Street comments. Yet the new work is a breakthrough. A painting is hanging drying in the middle of previous works. A couple of cheeky monkeys. She hasn't finished it apparently. Anja looks anxious to get it finished. There are a few paintings with NOT FINISHED in masking tape over them. Cheeky monkey painting is finished for me. One monkey is filled in, the other isn’t.I like the one that isn’t. I conjure up my own poetry on Mr Unfinished Monkey.
It’s not what you leave in, its what you leave out.
Learn to know when to stop.
Stop just before you feel it is finished.
Let the audience fill in the gaps.
Let them do the work.
Anja also makes sculptures of the eroticised beasts found in her paintings. They are smaller spawns of the paintings and their unpainted glaze is the perfect paradox to all that colour. How menacing would they be if they were life-size or painted back into the painting in their minimal forms? Poetry can be found in symbolism, just give me room to breathe! Unfinished monkey painting has an unfettered energy as Annie Attridge so rightly pointed out with its delicious drips revealing the painting's history and outline of the fruit where in other works this would be filled in with paint to the Nth degree. Anja clearly loves what she is doing with equal measure of both curse and bless in breathing life into images. Mark Jackson points out Anja could gain further poetry by titling them as bluntly and directly as possible, saying exactly what they are, "Woman in Yellow Dress, A Bowl of Fruit, Monkey with Female Breast". This seems to be a welcomed contrast to already highly loaded symbolism.
When I speak with other artists and students, I ask them "Where is the energy within the work?"So often artists don't ever strip away the work to its barest essentials where the real poetry is found, where the works grabs the audience by the balls and gets them to that both compelling and repelling place. See "Paint Perform Political” www.artvehicle.com/feature/1 .
One of the best artist announcements came in the Summer at IN DISCUSSION 4 in Hampshire where painter Alastair Eales said he wished he could draw as well as he could paint.
Alastair is a brilliant storyteller who had all the audience intrigued by explaining the historical underpinning to the paintings that he was working on for an exhibition that celebrated the mediaeval treasures of Winchester's Hyde Abbey (where King Alfred is buried). He can talk the hind legs off a donkey about his series of paintings inspired by Hans Holbein‘s portraits of King Henry VIII's unfortunate brides. Ali, like Anja, is caught between the paradox of abstraction versus figuration. Both try to reveal a poetry behind already highly consumed images in popular culture. Alastair is interested in personalising the anti-personal and subverting the mass produced. He once explored cardboard as a way of subverting trashy materiality and used to make cardboard dens as he liked the sensation of being in a constricted and defined space and would hide in cardboard dens as a kid in various games he used to play in his native Cape Town. Such consideration to artificial environments is clearly present in how he approaches painting. Ali cites the hedonistic worlds of the theatre and the interior design magazine as being inspirational as both suspend belief and reality.The canvas is the constructed space and its edges supply the physical barriers. Ali approaches painting in the same way as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg wanted to emphasise the hand-made human gesture in everyday throwaway graphics and imagery. He painted, then stopped and made digital images but preferred the happy accidents and slippages that painting allows so stopped and started painting again. Alistair is painterly in his approach. In the discussion, Ali presents us with a contemporary update of the Holbein classics by painting large circles over the surface. Everyone in the audience agrees that circles are universally recognised as mere decoration and don't need to be questioned and that the viewer always identifies with the figure in the first instance. I do not agree with this. The circles play a fundamental role in the make up of the painting. Their abstract quality allow the viewer to develop a poetry by their reduced form which may not be present if they were not omitted and the drama is also heightened by what Alastair refers to as colour "bounce" tension. A further set of paintings contain comic story book references such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and a cartoon of the Beatles. Ali’s collaging of the abstract competing with the highly stylised can be at times a little confusing. Here is an artist so clearly in love with paint that he is trying to get it all into the one canvas. When the abstract and the figurative do come together, Ali creates a glorious interplay. In one of his paintings, we see an outline of a face peekng out of the colour wash rainbow. The public and the private both exist here. In many ways Alastair is trying to preserve the images he loves by hiding them amongst a forest of painted rainbows and patterns. Kids fixate ideas on such cartoon characters and images and create stories about them and in this respect maybe he is trying to preserve innocence. We don't want to admit that probably many others had the same stories.Getting back to my original question, where is the real energy in Alastair's work? I think it comes from not just his animated character when he is passionately talking about his subject matter but in the piles of scrapbooks that laden his studio whose juxtapositions of image contain the same playful energy as Anja does when she enjoys painting.
Mid Summer 2009, I walk into Mike Ryder’s solo show in South London to be pleased to find works installed with the same sporadic distancing as in his past photographic installations. Mike's work has a similar approach to Ali's in preserving this bygone nostalgia by constructing paintings and photographic work which try to expose the poetics in the mass produced and mass obtainable. Mike, like the other 3, loves paint. He clearly loves the stuff to represent life's idiosyncrasies and peculiarities. My favourite piece is not a painting but a photograph Mike has disrupted its glossy surface with marker pen. Not immediately apparent at a distance but on closer inspection its still flinch-worthy when you realise the photo has been interfered with and are not sure what is photograph and what is interference. It is this simple jarring that sets up a simple yet effective arrest for the viewer. In other works Mike makes the interference more dramatic with vivid use of colour and form, as in the case of the bus and the aeroplane.Yet I prefer the more discreet mark.Like the superheroes and childhood characters Mike regularly appropriates in his paintings, he also likes to promote himself in a variety of ways pre-show. Before the opening of Too-Rye-Ay, he produced a series of online flyers advertising the show where different typefaces are placed behind and in front of previous works. He adopts a superstar status in the world of Mike Ryder and its eclectic variations. I like this as he takes his paintings into different forms which invite us to consume his work in the same way as a mass billboard poster. The digitised image appears flat on the computer screen, and so with the seductive surfaces that he paints obliterated, he beckons us to want to see them in real life thus making the reality of viewing the work in the flesh even more desirable. The ten year scrapbook I once kept is no more. I digitally photographed every page before destroying the epic paper beast.
Anja, Mike and Alastair all use the act of collaging in either the preparation to a work or in the work itself. Sarah Kate Wilson clearly understands the complexities of play and juxtaposition, of collaging forms, as she demonstrated with her recent solo show Lunar Rainbow at John Jones space in London, where paintings were hung amongst balloon bouquets, swings and dens of coloured balls. Her paintings have a bright gorgeous glow with abstract forms competing with actual objects which have been selected for their "paint-like" quality. In amongst her jazzy patterns,blobs and drips, these objects are combined to heighten the fact that paint is just as ephemeral and temporal as the junk shop materials she weaves into her canvases.
I first encountered Sarah's work at the John Jones space. It was a big painting installation. Sarah clearly also understands the performative act of painting and I feel the balloons and other paraphenelia that co-exist with the paintings act as signifiers to what she wants to achieve in her paintings.The swing signifies the shift between two realities, static and still and the balloons, the shift that can occur in volume and depth. Such performative triggers in time will no doubt manifest themselves back into her paintings. A few weeks later I saw Sarah's work at the Slade where she is currently studying. Her paintings had grown in confidence. She had grown in confidence. It was inspiring.
The paintings had a further excessive bombardment of colour and pattern, in places loose in other parts controlled but there were several collages on the walls which through their immediacy gained a heightened tension with the speed of their production allowing for a more expressive and concise gesture. Sarah should be celebrated for her intuition in colour and form tension in what she describes as "a million things in the world fight for your attention".
All that See Me, all that Juniper Park.
END.
Anja Priska’s IN DISCUSSION was held in November 2009 and included guest speakers Mark Jackson, Phoebe Cope, Gemma Nelson, Kate Street, Annie Attridge, Charlotte Young, Faith Edwards, Liselotte Boegh Mathiasen and Thorbjorn Andersen.
www.anjapriska.com
Alastair Eales’ IN DISCUSSION was held in September 2009
Sarah Kate Wilson, Lunar Rainbow, John Jones Project Space ,12th October - 13th November 2009
http://www.johnjones.co.uk/the-project-space/past/sarah-kate-wilson-.aspx
www.sarahkatewilson.com
Mike Ryder, Too-Rye-Ay, Tank Gallery, London, August 2009
www.mikeryder.co.uk
Lee Campbell, Juniper Park, Chapter gallery, Cardiff, January 2007
http://www.chapter.org/8346.html
OTHER SELECTED WRITINGS CIRCA 2009
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