- Venue
- Fieldgate Gallery (ended) / Cafe Gallery Projects
- Location
- London
Dark Materials
A taste for a sumptuous kind of darkness has resurfaced in contemporary art. Leaning towards the grotesque, but with a seductive turn that separates it from the abject, this is Romanticism’s twisted cousin: the most recent incarnation of the Gothic in art. Two recent London exhibitions, Things That Go Bump in the Night, currently at Cafe Gallery Projects, and the boldly titled Gothic, which showed at Fieldgate Gallery earlier this spring, tap into this tendency.
The term “Gothic” gets thrown around rather carelessly, but it is in this haphazard application that its true essence as a trans-historical nomad and shape-shifter is revealed. During the Renaissance, Giorgio Vasari first applied the word – pejoratively – to 12th century architecture that countered classical order in favour of “organic” form. This instance of “Gothic” is sometimes dismissed as irrelevant to the contemporary usage of the word, but such refusal to pursue unity and rationality has framed the Gothic through its countless mutations. Victorian “Gothick” novelists drew upon a fantasised picture of pre- Enlightenment medieval feudal society. Their tales heave with now-familiar Gothic conventions such as the double, split-personalities, and the resurfacing of dark family secrets. They are followed by Freud who, with his emphasis on repressed memory and focus in the uncanny, depicted our consciousness as Gothic.
The Gothic is a forever building, collaged creature, ready to wedge itself into the culture of any period as a compendium of nostalgia built upon nostalgia. Today, old habits of the Gothic acquire new life in American shopping malls and television series like Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Desperate Housewives. Feasting on new cultural phenomena such as environmental anxiety, suburbia, and as suggested by Jean Baudrillard, even the AIDS epidemic[1], the Gothic is still devoted to the debasement of conventional reality, fascinated with dissonance, drama and sexuality, and sometimes even engages in a bit of the old dolled-up medievalism.
The ‘90s art world saw a new kind of Gothic emerge with “abject art” by artists like Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, and witnessed the YBA’s obsession with bodily disintegration. It is a challenge, however, to pinpoint the genre’s shape in 2008. Due to a piecemeal characterization, the word “Gothic” cannot describe any practice completely. Skirting around the edges of the Gothic tendency is the only way to delve into the heart of what defines it today. Curated by Richard Ducker, Gothic at Fieldgate Gallery did just this. Together, the artworks got at something that they don’t quite embody alone. Similarly, while the curators of Things That Go Bump…do not use the term “Gothic” (the press release mentions “a world out of kilter”), many of the featured works indicate a twist on its conventions. Anachronism, excess, deviance, morbid debasement, theatrical horror and a consistent undercurrent of sensuality; Gothic and Things That Go Bump…nudge at this fragmented truth.
Paul Harper and Andrea Heller’s Death Jukebox, featured in Things That Go Bump…, mirrors the ability of the Gothic manner to resurrect itself using the cultural equipment of each new era. The artists contacted a clairvoyant named Steve, who in turn contacted the spirits of several deceased music industry figures and returned with their current top 10 albums. The albums, some of which were released after the death of the person who listed them, were then loaded into a jukebox for gallery visitors to operate. The artwork alludes to the 18th century penchant for the riddlic uncanny, tethered as it is to the legacy of automata and the dissection of sound and source. But most importantly, Death Jukebox revives the Gothic device of fragmentation by way of a contemporary strategy, the fragmentation of authorship.
There is a risk of venturing no further than stylistic nostalgia when dealing with genres like the Gothic, uncanny, and horror. Things that go bump…however, maintains a critical interest, in part because it picks up on the popular usage of a Gothic aesthetic. Edwina Ashton’s drawings of enigmatic and curiously deviant creatures are, in their narrative qualities, half-familiar. We are reminded that all fairytales are slightly twisted and many children’s books quite dark, driving home just how deep the Gothic sensibility resides in the human consciousness. In contrast to the elliptical mystery of Ashton’s drawings, Jay Cloth’s collage work sees the ritual grotesque and commercial culture collide. The dizzying thing about his works is that the erotic macabre doesn’t look out of place in our modern visual landscape.
Whereas the pop elements of Things that go bump… make it candidly self-reflective, the Fieldgate Gallery exhibition displayed a marked lack of irony. This is refreshing given the habitual allusion in current practice to Romanticism, which has arguably been ironic since its inception. In Luke Brennan and Delaney Martin’s thrillingly disorienting and literary installations at Fieldgate, dark histories resurface as cinematic fantasy and psychological charge merge with reality. The apparent sincerity with which the artists embrace Gothic tropes adds another layer to the suspension of disbelief involved in navigating the work. But such sincerity does not preclude their critical investigation of history and Lynchian fixation with the sinister side of modern everyday experience.
Also featured in Gothic, the work of sculptor Douglas White fuses the manmade and organic in ways that upend nature. Counsel is made from two burnt recycling bins found abandoned on a London estate. The process of distortion has frozen them into gaping clods that hint at a cartoon version of anthropomorphism. These forms are fantastical, on the border of totem and comic book, yet dead serious, yielding grave historical and ecological questions that haunt rather than harass the viewer.
These artists bring a historically-rooted compulsion to muddle nature and artifice into the present. This stands out particularly in White’s intuitive use of materials (his sculptures issue largely from by-products, detritus, lucky finds), as well as Brennan and Martin’s deployment of media to psychological effect. In fact, both exhibitions showcase an exuberant attitude towards material experimentation. We see it in Tessa Farmer’s macabre yet ornamental memento mori fashioned out of the remains of small animals, featured in Gothic. At Cafe Gallery, Michael James Jones’ manipulation of film footage recalls the material artistry of the illusionist in early film history. Additionally, Anders Clausen’s busts follow upon a tradition associated with classical ideals, but, subjected to mutations in wood, plaster and paint, they claim a Gothic inheritance of monstrous beauty. This unbounded treatment of media pictures the artist as unfettered alchemist, unabashedly exerting his or her own will over matter. From Victor Frankenstein to The Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill, the Gothic tradition reserves a central role for this kind of artistic agency. In its stock “mad scientist” characters, villain meets naïve brainiac in an apocalyptic revision of the Romantics’ creative genius.
It is unlikely that any of the artists featured in these shows define their art as “Gothic”. Mentions of the abject and the uncanny smatter their various texts and artists’ statements, but do not do justice to much of the work; the fractured and evolving Gothic is more multi-dimensional than the uncanny, and unlike the abject, which has grown aseptic with academic fashion, the Gothic is unabashedly pleasurable.
These shows indicate a tendency in current practice, and in doing so, grapple with the question of why this tendency exists now. And both quite aptly hold back on an answer. It is tempting to hazard a diagnosis of contemporary culture based on this resurgence of the Gothic in art. Many commentators respond with dismal hypotheses (Are we so emotionally repressed that we are drawn to this genre that revels in psychological extremes? Are we filling the vacuum left by growth of a society committed to rationality?). It’s difficult to speculate, especially in a discussion of only two exhibitions. However, such sweeping conclusions detract attention from something indicated by both Gothic and Things That Go Bump… That is, an earnest enjoyment – in art, the process of making it, and in the sensual, exuberant and bold potential of its constituent materials.
[1] Jean Baudrillard. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. James Benedict (London and New York: Verso, 1993).
