- Venue
- De La Warr Pavilion
- Location
- South East England
Curating the streams of work produced over any person’s career into a digestible exhibition is a challenging task; but none more so than an artist like Ian Breakwell. A man fixated with studying infinite documentations of the most mundane items that populate every-day reality, Breakwell assembled his ongoing notes with a mass of numbers and dates that mark their space in the eternal flow of time; he was instinctively obsessed with the material of modern life.
Contrasting his work to that of a scientific journal of ‘logical and progressive argumentation’, he talks of himself striving through chaos towards an end-product of deliberate and wholesome ambiguity. In the end he finds himself struggling through his own nihilistic void to find something that he can attach hope to. ‘Keep Things As They Are’ documents in never-before-seen completeness, the uncompromising process and end-result of this life-long struggle.
The multiple disciplines and medias on show, from painting, photography, music, speech and television recording, give the collective works a multi-sensory allure that is cohesive in its complex and ongoing dichotomy of human order and chaos. It is also great testament to the broad expanses within which Breakwell conducted his work.
Amongst it all, one immediately notices a recurring theme of tedious repetition, and oscillating fragmentation, as his diaries attempt to numerate the vast and innumerable depths of detail in every-day life. The most iconic representation of this is demonstrated in his 1974 Diary and The Walking Man Diary where he writes his notes for the day repeatedly over the same image. Having observed the same man walk past his office every day for many years, Breakwell begins a list of all the objects the man passes on his way to wherever he may or may not be going.
His work focuses on such minutia with what feels like a very self-consciously structuralist and subversive approach. His more intensive studies of human activity such as Ghost Dance and The Walking Man reveal a more desperate void at the heart of day-to-day life that instantly casts a chill on its audience. Ghost Dance plays vividly on situational ‘reality’ and inner emotion, ‘public proof of having a good time… of having existed… a plot we can only imagine’.
Ultimately though, what makes Breakwell’s work so important and attractive amongst his avant-garde peers is, particularly in his later work, the way in which he strives to find a peaceful equilibrium amid the torrid flux he explores, to ‘keep things as they are’. The famous face portraits seem to me to capture this humanised neutrality and utter acceptance at the heart of Breakwell’s work.
Indeed the more vivid explorations of mortality that take place in his later works, such as the X-ray images of a dying man in The Hinge, are accompanied by prose that delicately reveal a sense of ambiguous hope behind an immediate darkness; ‘Last Day in Winter, First Day in Spring’.
Elsewhere he goes on, ‘I lie back and think of what George Brecht once said to me, that nothing is necessarily gained by getting out of bed’. Breakwell proceeds to name fifty such things, including a dawn chorus and a full pint of Guiness left on the side of the bar, and so despite the ensuing darkness of his advancing death, he gets out of bed, ‘and then another day, such as it is, begins.’
Breakwell both finds and assigns value to the items that populate his days, and no matter how meaningless each may seem, there is a sort of collective meaning for him to hold onto in this struggle. It is the pleasure that the little things give him; that can be lost amid a larger pursuit of life order and fulfilment. It is a sort of liberated nihilism that is in many way’s quite faithful to the reality of existence, and its infinite horizons.
The warmth of this sentiment is best encapsulated in the separate installation upstairs, a large screening of Breakwell’s 2002 piece The Other Side filmed at the De La Warr itself, where we see the ambling slow-dance of the local aged community, accompanied by the slow breaths and sighs of the sea.
Breakwell’s greatest triumph was in turning an existential despair into a quite warming story of kindred individual solidarity. This is explored most intimately in his later diaries, often written with both spirit and humour. Finally speaking of the lung cancer that would eventually end his life, he said ‘I never chain smoked. Each cigarette was a pause in time’s flow. I made it my point to never give it up.’
The exhibition remains open at the De La Warr Pavilion until January 13th.
