On
crowded morning trains, rush-hour commuters hold
newspapers high to obliterate first-hand experience while
immersing themselves in a shared. off-the peg reality
knitted together by editors and media barons. Life now
falls upon us in a shower of mediated events, none more
or less profound than another as wars and cereal ads
occupy equal column inches and interpretation is
entrusted to the custody of journalistic synopsis.
Enduring this information blizzard, existence passes in a
stream of gossip and rumour (much of which is none of our
business) and identity fragments into multiple gullible
heads eager to believe disparate messages. Eventually the
once sovereign subject capitulates and abandons the
fickle, libidinal body, leaving little more than a
translucent consumer eager to be duped.
But though humans en mass may coagulate in faceless
uniformity, like snowflakes, closer inspection reveals no
two to be alike and today an artist might be tempted to
act as a solvent to such homogenising tendencies and even
restore a model of free, unique selfhood to a society
thoroughly cloned by media's demand for a predictable
audience.
Udomsak Krisanamis and Peter Doig rise to this challenge
in almost opposite ways; one directly applies himself to
media's product with obsessive deconstructive labour, the
other paints glimpses of alternative lifestyles only to
find each escape route tainted by unexpected
vacuity.
Krisanamis catches harmful flakes of media fallout and
transforms them into reflections of sold souls and
corrupted hearts. Cutting text from newspapers and other
printed matter he deletes, using tar-like paint,
everything, except elliptical white spaces at the centre
of 'O's and zeros, thereby preserving only innocent blank
space shining at the heart of dark textual meaning. His
extreme censorship implies that the rejected words are
either incorrect or superfluous to a search for higher
language.
These strips and scraps are assembled by the thousand
onto stretched gauze worked into something resembling
paintings. The results have a surprisingly hi-tech feel.
Viewed from a distance, one large work creates moire
patterns as hundreds of tiny circlets oscillate in
contingency. Smaller works bring to mind circuit boards -
not printed with legible messages but encrusted with pure
power conducting material, and others, in which
cellophane is shredded into translucent noodles cutting
vertical lines through oily black grounds, look as though
cats cratched by something desperate to escape an
over-mediated life.
Peter Doig shares the walls and rooms at Arnolfini and
answers Krisanamis' anxious hail storms with several
blizzards of his own. Snowfalls are a common sight in
Doigland as are lone, faceless figures who go night
fishing or hang-out existentially in. a wilderness most
urbanites know only through travel ads.
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Peter
Doig "Milky Way", 1989-90 |
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A varied
selection of Doig's paintings ranging from 1990 to '98 is
shown here and some of the early works have a noticeably
easier, more open-minded feel. In Hitch-Hiker (1990) a
shiny red truck (reminiscent of fuel pumps in Edward
Hopper's Gas) stretches its long load across a wide-angle
landscape of plain green field and tumbling, sea-like
sky. The paintings title provides a trigger which, like
the figures leaving a rock concert in Doig's later
Buffalo Station (1997-8) (not shown here) evokes the
closure of 60s and 70s idealism- a time when highways
changed from freedom roads into cluttered death-traps
patrolled by psychopaths and when hippies became
indistinguishable from their long-haired exploiters.
Doig's paintings increasingly articulate such a
post-revolutionary moment, describing an indifferent,
shoulder-shrugging state-of-mind encountered at the end
of rainbows. His is neither a utopian nor dystopian
vision but more a Zen enhanced view of non-events taking
place in nowhere lands.
Another example is Milky Way, (1989-90) in which sticky
white stars, sprayed across an indigo sky are mirrored in
a lake around which grow spooky, phosphorescent trees. A
lone canoeist drifts idly on the surface and this typical
Doig motive of solitude amidst symmetry-in-reflection is
also exampled here in Comp Forestia (Caretaker) (1996)
where another languishing figure seems to acquiesce to
the broken promise of comprehensible pattern in the
universe.
However, for many, any guidance the heavens have to offer
is obscured by a haze of sulfurous street lamps and
salvation from urban ruts is just a dream. The resulting
repressed desire and denied hope is compensated for by
inflamed gestalt perception which, desperately imposing
pattern on unrelated events, manifests itself as epidemic
paranoia and cults of synchronicity. Meanwhile vampiric
media continue to suck the meaningful dry, hi-jacking the
once redemptive constellations to be commodified as
astrology pages in magazines. But such crass capitalist
mechanisms only add fuel to the fire of Doig's and
Krisanamis' respective endeavors to rescue a little of
the romance of being human from the voracious appetite of
the cold-blooded inanimate world.
Paul O'Kane
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