Third Text

4 September 2023

Paul O’Kane

‘Life Is More Important Than Art’, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 14 June – 3 September 2023  ^[1]

Life may be more important than art, but coffee is more important than both. I set out bright and early to attend the Whitechapel’s morning press event for this exhibition, which promised ‘pastries and coffee’. But on arrival I couldn’t find evidence of any refreshments, and not wishing to crudely draw attention to my appetite I undertook an initial reconnaissance of the show in a barren state of caffeine deprivation. I later noted that there was quite a marked difference between my initial decaffeinated tour and my later re-tour, fuelled and informed by a double espresso. So much, then, for objective judgements of art, for personal positions and connoisseurly expertise, all of which can be so easily swayed by diet. Similarly, when I first began to wear spectacles in my forties, I noticed that all my favourite paintings in London’s museum collections now looked quite different, again raising questions about my knowledge and judgement of them. Coffee and spectacles must, then, be taken into account as influential prostheses colouring our human descriptions and opinions of art.

In the writings and otherwise recorded thoughts of Gilles Deleuze we can find the concept of ‘immanence’, something opposed to transcendence but nevertheless interpreted as ‘divine’. Immanence could be described as a divine experience of our innate, constant and inescapable immersion in things, in life, in time, in the now, in here, in events. Deleuze also loathed abstractions, false syntheses, and syllogisms assumed to represent life by means of lazy logic and habitual patterns of grammar. Hence, he once claimed that rather than saying ‘grass is green’ it would be more appropriate to say ‘grass and green’ – however awkward this might feel. Similarly, he seems to have preferred the statement ‘a life’ to the overly abstract and singular ‘life’. This difference might look small on paper, but the implications could be philosophically huge, leading us to reframe, rephrase and rethink experience. Perhaps the idea that there is no such thing as ‘life’ but only and always ‘a life’ could encourage us to affirm, cherish and value our very own ‘a life’ and not just our social media ‘A Reel’.

In the age of Facebook and Instagram, the timely apotheosis of which helped many survive the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone can be or become an artist, and all of life seems to become art. The walls, gates, doors and windows separating art inside the gallery from the realm beyond are more easily breached than ever before by virtual imagery and disembodied data. During the pandemic, we might have also had an opportunity to rethink our ‘a life’ as something unique and priceless. Henceforth, we closed the so-called gap between art and life, an idea cultivated by 1960s US artists and their European partners. Henceforth, we can regard as ‘important’ all kinds of everyday events, while being less eager to allocate some as more worthy of attention by art.

High and new technologies have helped dissolve traditional divisions between art and life, and those aforementioned artists who claimed to be capable of closing the gap between art and life by using what was then current and new technology (eg photography, 16 mm film, typewriters, etc) were influenced not only by their own cutting-edge machinery but also by their post-World War Two embrace of alternative, different and exotic thinking. Some of this was imported from Asia in Buddhism and its Zen variant, and in the associated concepts and forms of Haiku, Koans and Satori. Hence the Dharma bum-style Beat poet (and ally of Bob Dylan) Allen Ginsberg could proclaim his creative method to be ‘First Thought, Best Thought’, an axiom that does indeed seem to close the gap between art, life and importance as rapidly and decisively as possible.

Janette Parris, This Is Not a Memoir, ‘West Ham’, 2023, digital drawing, courtesy of the artist

‘Life Is More Important Than Art’ began with a parade of pictures by Janette Parris. They each include a crisp digital drawing of a landmark that was familiar to the artist during her time growing up in the ‘deprived’ or ‘poor’ London borough of Newham. The drawings are surmounted by blocks of upper-case text which explain the relevance of the picture below by means of a personal anecdote that usually ends with a wry or ironic observation. They are never laugh-out-loud funny but gently amusing. Parris has been pursuing this personalised ‘deadpan’ aesthetic since the 1990s when I first met her and her work. Then, it approximated something like wall-mounted pages or images from a colourful zine and documented banal events in the daily life of the artist. However, these works at the Whitechapel arrive at a stranger hybrid of text and image. There is something slightly Soviet, almost North Korean about the high level of clarity visually communicated here. It reminds me of the way artist Mark Titchener sometimes displays highly visible written statements that hover between the didactic and the rhetorical, emphasising the style in which it is delivered as key to their power and efficacy. This comparison might then reveal that behind Parris’s poker-faced representation of a highly personal experience a wider political agenda emerges.

Parris’s memories, titled This Is Not A Memoir, raised for me the question of just what the ‘deadpan’ is, how it operates and why it succeeds. A variant of ‘poker-face’, its use was perfected and deployed with devastating effect by early movie giants like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, both of whom could stare into a lens and thus into the eyes of millions worldwide and, with an entirely expressionless expression, transmit beyond the Babel of all otherwise divisive language something universally human accessed simply by emphasising unshifting, bottomless eyes over and above any other facial inflexions or features.

I also tried to see Parris’s works in Deleuzian terms, not as ‘life’ but as ‘a life’, ie the particular life of this particular young, black, working class woman and artist and many other particular things besides, growing up in a particular part of the world at a particular time. However, paradoxically, this is also where and when Parris’s anecdotes seem to become commentaries, not only on an individual’s unique experience but on an entire culture, gender, nation, and, it could be said, a continent, world, epoch, etc. But having arrived at these thoughts, I realised I was channelling the spirit of Nobel Prize-winner Annie Ernaux, whose wonderful book The Years I read recently and which manages to intimately describe the life (and we might say history) of one French woman (to date), and this inevitably becomes a history of France during the same period (the 1940s to the 2000s).

The title of this show is a quote from James Baldwin, one of those writers with whom you sometimes feel every word deserves to be re-cited as you read. But the motive for this show might well be rooted in the recent pandemic (referred to explicitly here in one recent work by John Smith). During that fearful and bleak time, people all over the world encountered an existential threat that made them rethink their lifestyles and their values. As a lasting consequence of the corona virus, art, always associated with a certain ‘importance’, might have to take a back seat while we sort our life out. This show and its title may have been, then, a first opportunity to use a themed exhibition in a major venue as a reflection on and a re-evaluation of our pandemic moment.

What is more important, art or life? Dada chose to undermine importance per se while celebrating seeming unimportance – for example, Kurt Schwitters rescuing a mere bus ticket from the gutter and elevating it to the status of the star of a collage, or John Heartfield using photomontage to lampoon the puffed-up self-importance of big business and its nexus with Nazism. As above, 1960s American artists extended the influence of Dada into Pop while claiming to close or eradicate ‘the gap between art and life’, and this could now involve various forms of brinkmanship, taking art and the artist to the limit of their identity and value, through Pop’s embrace of kitsch, through dematerialisation, happenings, minimalism, conceptual art, etc.

This Whitechapel show might revive some of these art historical trajectories, but if so it does so only tangentially. It did have a slightly ‘historical’ feel, however, although having just published a book on ‘History in Contemporary Art’ I am still seeing everything around me in those terms. ^[2]  Nevertheless, in compiling relevant references with which to craft a contextualising response to this exhibition it is difficult to resist recalling that modern art was founded on a new attention to ‘life’, notably via the exhortations of the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, who sought to drag artists and models out of their all-too-ideal studios into the daylight and other realities of Parisian modernity. Incidentally, in the summer of 2007 the Hayward Gallery staged a painting survey show under Baudelaire’s title ‘The Painting of Modern Life’, and this followed a similarly themed exhibition at The Whitechapel, titled ‘Faces in the Crowd – Picturing Modern Life from Manet to Today’ in 2004–2005. As is well known, part of the cultural revolution that is modern art (following the political revolutions that rocked France into modernity) was its revaluation of the relative ‘importance’ of people, things and events. This led to an ‘epic’ or ‘heroic’ reading of everyday life, here invoking another relevant exhibition held at the Hayward back in 1994 titled ‘The Epic and the Everyday’ (this time focused on photography).

Today’s Whitechapel show and its curators have their very own historical framework, as well as their own motives and aims. Some of the works, including those by Janette Parris, William Cobbing, Sarah Dobais, Matthew Krishanu, John Smith and Rana Begum are current, but these recent speculations are provided with historical ballast by some more familiar yet still ‘contemporary’ works by, again, John Smith, and Mark Wallinger and Susan Hiller. Meanwhile, the artist named Jerome contributes a work that seems neither of the two, old nor new, and perhaps neither art nor life. In Action Black (2008), the artist offers up what look like lacquered floorboards, having apparently provided them previously as a surface in various other public spaces for that particular gathering and for this gallery audience to stand upon, stain, scuff and scratch. From this consequently scarred surface, onto which indexical evidence of passing time and life has been marked, pieces of paint or lacquer are then removed and appended to some nearby objects that look very much like art, in that they are recognisable as stretched canvases, or ‘paintings’. Thus art, life and relative ‘importance’ enter strange and shifting relations here while seeming to expand the possibilities of the exhibition’s title.

In an adjacent space, Alia Syed screened her Fatima’s Letter from 1992. This is a grainy and old black and white movie, shot decades ago in Whitechapel underground station. These scenes are interspersed with images showing textual details of a letter. Like all such now antiquated ‘analog’ imagery, this film comes with a special indexical legitimacy that, in the age of the vivid, virtual, Hi-Def and digital, makes an irresistible but peculiar appeal to our emotions. Old image technologies urge us to venture back in time, to ‘another country’ as novelist L P Hartley famously wrote, where ‘they do things differently’. ^[3]  In the context of this show, Syed’s movie seems to ask us to consider – as do the works by Hiller, Smith and Wallinger – not just the ‘what’ of life and of art, but the ‘when’, ie they analyse life’s, or art’s, essential temporality, fleetingness or event-uality.

These ideas can also return us to explore the show’s title, perhaps even asking whether life only becomes art (and thus gains access to a certain ‘importance’) once seen retrospectively – ie re-presented rather than simply being present or ‘contemporary’. A historian, or lover of history, might, after all, claim that the contemporary has no form by or with which to grasp or value it; that it is merely passive and in complicit participation with the constant evaporation of passing time. While what we call art, what we call history and perhaps what we call ‘life’, too, are always islands in that stream, re-presentations that interrupt the flow of presence, obstacles or stepping-stones perhaps, by means of which we find our points of stability, perspective and orientation.

John Smith, The Girl Chewing Gum, 1976, still from 16mm film transferred to video, 12 mins, courtesy of the artist, Kate MacGarry, London and Tanya Leighton, Berlin and Los Angeles

This might allude to a certain profundity that underlies the wit and humour of John Smith’s classic short film Girl Chewing Gum (1976). Profundities often tend to make us laugh, if only nervously in fear of their disturbing implications. Having filmed an ‘unimportant’ looking street corner in London, apparently without any aim, focus or purpose, Smith’s subsequent addition of a carefully timed and contrived voiceover makes it appear as if he is directing the ‘live’ events that pass before the camera. In truth, Smith is observing life passing by like the rest of us, but his art here is to make it seem as though he is one step ahead and in control of events, that life is, in fact, art. This has implications for how we perceive our own lives; perhaps as barely contained chaos, maybe as destiny or fate informed by faith and belief, or as none of the above. But ultimately, we all probably need or at least want to believe that to a certain extent we oversee the lives that we lead.

It may be true that we encounter art, and perhaps take on the role and mantel of ‘artist’, on each and every occasion that we pause, step back, re-present, reflect upon and re-frame life, ie rather than being lost in the flow of it. We might make art and become artists with every joke or personal observation we make, including every Facebook witticism posted or Instagram image uploaded. Aided by mobile phones with their built-in cameras and our QWERTY keyboards we can momentarily elevate the importance of almost any encounter, with a flower poking through a crack in the pavement, with a meal we are about to devour, with a holiday snap or selfie, etc. Thus, life becomes a seething maelstrom of cultural productions, our uploads of cultural ‘data’ numbering in the billions per second.

John Smith’s more recent work Citadel (2020) is a ‘lockdown’ video that uses high quality, high-definition digital video, along with some crisp editing and additional voiceovers drawn from Boris Johnson’s speeches of the time. All of this cancels any nostalgia we might begin to feel for the period of lockdown (‘lockstalgia’ anybody?) and brings home the barren and bleak existence that was endured over 2020 through Johnson’s period of unwelcome interference in our democratic processes. Citadel, Smith’s historic sounding title, is echoed by Wallinger’s Threshold of the Kingdom (2000); both suggest that art not only adds or awards ‘importance’ to life but can even elevate it to a sense of sublime grandeur. That sublime quality, often concealed within the folds of life, can be revealed by a probing artist such as Susan Hiller whose conscientiously researched (and here meticulously displayed) J Street Project (2002–2005) insists upon our acknowledgement of the kinds of ponderous historical gravity that surround us every day. This work features a kind of revelation or unearthing of the history of the historical Jewish presence in Germany, hardwired, as it were, into the environment through street names found all over the country, and which, following Hiller’s attentions, now seem to ‘hide in plain sight’. Hiller’s piece is given plenty of space and time in this show, and its message is delivered in various ways that might be called epistemes. The more than three hundred street names that she collected (some might be translated as avenues, ways, paths, closes, etc) are represented variously as: a crisply mounted wall list; as locations on a simplified wall map of Germany; as a wall full of small framed and glazed still photographs showing streets and signs; and then also as video footage of the same sites. These various representations have their relative values and differences, and each sway our impression of the underlying historical facts by their particular means of representation. But perhaps it is the videos that best bring home the true banality of contemporary life going on, with all its unimportance, as if unaware of evil history, and yet always in the grim shadow of the most important of historical events. Then again, this is something we all and always have to do, as the burdens of history are too great and too grave to carry and confront every day, even though they await our attention, like ghosts, almost present at all times and places.

Susan Hiller, The J Street Project, 2002–2005, video installation, single channel projection, colour and stereo sound, 69 min, courtesy of the Estate of Susan Hiller and Lisson Gallery

Mark Wallinger’s video, Threshold of the Kingdom, is today partially historicised by what we might now see as its relatively low-definition digital image quality. Here, figures enter a London airport, their motions slowed by editing software as they pass through automated doors. The busy space, the people, the machinery of the doors, are all silenced by the editor, but the eerily decelerated scenario is redeemed by the addition of the sound of an ethereal seventeenth-century choral masterpiece, originally composed for the pious and holy space of the Sistine Chapel. Given this rich synthesis we might wonder where, how and who these people might be, and where they might be today, twenty-three years later.  Were they possibly aware, back then in 2000, that they might be seen by us as passing a millennial threshold between one historical epoch and another, perhaps moving between life and art or even progressing from mortality into a kind of immortalisation that only art awards?

Mark Wallinger, Threshold to the Kingdom, 2000, still from single channel video projection, 11'12", courtesy of the artist and Tate Images

Painter Matthew Krishanu has contributed three short series of his instantly recognisable works to this show. His paintings have always seemed to benefit from complexities and details that he generously leaves out. This leaves the viewer to face a sparse and it could be said ‘quiet’ image of a world in which events can rarely be described as dramatic but might be outtakes from a slowly unfolding but inexorable narrative of which we cannot know the beginning or end. The painter Alex Katz comes to mind as excusably comparable with Krishanu, although Krishanu’s figures are less strident, proud and confident than those of Katz. Krishanu’s tend to look nervously aware of their precarity, yet there is something in common here if only technically in terms of shared areas of flat, fruity colour and somewhat simplified figuration (which Katz almost leads to abstraction). In positioning Krishanu’s look, style or flavour, we could also invoke the pale and subtle near-invisibility of Luc Tuymans’s figures, objects and events, whose importance seems to only increase with the subtlety of their presence. This places Krishanu at a strange crossroads of Tuymans and Katz, a place where he might not have stood before and might not relish standing, but I offer it anyway, for his and for your (other readers’) contemplation.

Matthew Krishanu, Four Children (Verandah), 2022, oil on canvas, 150 x 200 cm, courtesy of a private collection, photo by Peter Mallet

Krishanu’s rather fragile figures sometimes look out at us through simplified black irises that betray little about their identity, while nevertheless telling us something about the experience they might be undergoing in the scenes in which they find themselves. In the past few years, despite all the monumental media events to which we have all been attuned, two relatively modest news stories have moved me to an exceptional degree. Both involve lost and rescued children: the schoolboy soccer team trapped in a cave in Thailand in 2018, and the Colombian children, members of the Huitoto Indigenous community, who recently survived for several weeks in the jungle following a plane crash. Today, Krishanu’s often youthful figures look as though they, too, might appeal to be rescued, perhaps from the importance of art to be returned to their original status amid the modesty of life. In this way these figures begin to become objective, or at least to engage in a certain familiar empathy with the viewer. We might feel that they approximate some remaining, perhaps today unfashionable universality of the human condition, and this might allow us to also draw them into a further dialogue, this time with the early sculptures of the German sculptor Stephan Balkenhol.

I must underline the fact that two of the three series shown in ‘Life Is More Important Than Art’ are exceptional to Krishanu’s wider oeuvre, as they are tributes to the artist’s late wife, the renowned author Uschi Gatward who passed away in 2021 at a devastatingly young age. The brave inclusion of these paintings within the exhibition returns us to its title, in which we might now see its most tragic implications. In the face of tragedy, illness and death, the very idea of ‘importance’ requires reconsideration (similarly, Dada, mentioned above, lampooned authority, reason and all sense of ‘importance’ as a response to the meaningless tragedy of the First World War). Of what importance is art when the life of a beloved wife and mother and a lauded emerging writer are so cruelly curtailed? Nevertheless, the artist, who attended the press morning, spoke to assembled journalists of how his wife had encouraged him to paint her throughout the process of her illness. Now, the artist’s open, all-too recent wounds, his grieving and mourning remind us that the everyday world of so-called ‘normal’ life is – albeit often silently, invisibly – shot through with impossibilities that many, most and perhaps all of us eventually come to fear, face and endure.

Having circled the show a second time, and on this occasion buoyed by coffee, I joined a short but enlightening tour hosted by Gilane Tawadros, the show’s co-curator and the Whitechapel Gallery’s new director. I then had to run for a bus to reach another appointment, but even then I was still wrapped up in this show’s theme, one that has long been close to my own heart and concerns. Like Janette Parris, I grew up in council housing on a poor estate. This has made me feel like a ‘class migrant’ and often as an imposter, as I have struggled to make a way towards professionalisation in the arts. This trajectory always made me favour the most democratic (rather than esoteric) tendencies of modern and postmodern art. I find myself often writing around and about the art itself with references to my daily life (as I have done here), to the city and to popular culture, all of which I like to see, along with myself, as on level terms with the art.  

Hence, running for a London bus, as I did on leaving the Whitechapel Gallery that day, has always made me think of the immortal line ‘I Run For The Bus Dear, While Running I Think Of Us Dear’, written by Hal David and Burt Bacharach for their classic pop song I Say A Little Prayer For You (performed by both Aretha Franklin and Dionne Warwick). Perhaps this is the song (and the ‘work of art’) that takes me most immediately and directly to the experience of what Gilles Deleuze called ‘immanence’ (see above) – if, that is, immanence can be interpreted as a divine immersion in what already is, in the ordinary, the present, the now, the given, and not the exceptional or transcendent.

Having caught my bus, I looked down from its top deck as it slowly negotiated London’s heavy traffic. I began assessing just what about this experience might be art, might be life, might be important. We passed by the restrained ancient power of the Tower of London, then rode over the Victorian pastiche of those same values in the excessive and fantastic Tower Bridge. Where do art, life and importance sit in a scenario like this, in the heart of a busy city with all its spectacular eclecticism? A little further along the road my middle-aged male head was momentarily turned by a maroon Morris Minor motor car, probably built around the same time that I rolled off my parents’ production line sometime in the 1960s. It was a convertible model with the top down and, unlike me, in perfect condition, its paintwork gleaming in the sun. Thus, the streets, the city, and every aspect of the ‘a life’ that I am leading, all seemed a little more alive given the influence of the terms and examples raised and set out so conscientiously by Gilane Tawadros and Janette Parris in their timely exhibition.
 

^[1]   ‘Life Is More Important Than Art’ was curated by Gilane Tawadros and Janette Parris, and featured work by Ahmed Abokar, Amaal Alhaag, Rana Begum, William Cobbing, Sarah Dobai, R.I.P. Germain, Rahma Hassan, Susan Hiller, Jerome, Matthew Krishanu, Martin O’Brien, Elmi Original, Janette Parris, Gaby Sahhar, John Smith, Nadine Stijns, Alia Syed, Mitra Tabrizian, Mark Wallinger and Osman Yousefzada

^[2]   See Paul O’Kane, History in Contemporary Art and Culture, Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon, and New York, 2023

^[3]   L P Hartley’s now famous opening lines to his novel The Go-Between (1953) were ‘The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there’

Paul O’Kane is an artist, writer and senior lecturer at Central Saint Martins (CSM), University of the Arts London (UAL). He also teaches at SOAS, University of London. His book, History in Contemporary Art and Culture, was published by Routledge in 2023. He has also published numerous professional pieces, including articles, essays, reviews, and a group of artists' self-published books. His writings have appeared in Third Text's refereed journal, as well as Third Text Online and numerous other platforms, including Art Monthly. His long-running seminars ‘Technologies of Romance’ and ‘A Thing of the Past?’ (on history in contemporary art) contextualise the impact of today's ‘new’ technologies on art, life and culture, while attempting to use history to see, interpret and theorise our times.